Marketing Pilgrim

Last night, President Obama went to San Francisco and had dinner with many of the technology elite including Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Dick Costolo and Eric Schmidt. If you would like all the details the San Francisco Chronicle did a great job of looking at the gathering from many angles. Now, if you would rather just have a laugh read the cartoon from The Oatmeal below (hat tip to Greg Sterling of Search Engine Land).

Google is no different than any other company (other than it is one of the top brands on the planet and has a virtual crapload of cash but let’s not quibble). When a competitor shows a sign of weakness they need to be able to swoop in and pick the competitive carcass clean to feed itself.

Since Yahoo has made it clear that they are preparing to sunset their Delicious bookmark service Google has decided to make it easy for folks to bookmark Google for the place to go with this information. As Mashable reports

Google has just rolled out a convenient new tool for importing your Delicious bookmarks to Google Bookmarks.

The simple importer takes your Delicious login credentials (or lets you use a one-click OAuth button) and imports all your bookmarks, preserving labels or tags.

As of March 3, Bing and Yahoo will change their policy to allow the use of trademarked names as keywords in search ads. They say the change will bring their policy “in line with search industry practices” and some outlets say this is due to Google’s hard won victories in court over such matters.

Here’s the wording straight from Microsoft Advertising:

“As of March 3rd, Microsoft will cease editorial investigations into complaints about trademarks used as keywords to trigger ads on Bing & Yahoo! Search in the United States and Canada. If there is concern that an advertiser may be using a trademark keyword inappropriately, the trademark owner should contact the advertiser directly.”

Thirty seconds is the magic number for a TV ad, but for online video, fifteen seconds is much more common. Undoubtedly this comes from the idea that people won’t tolerate watching anything longer when they can easily skip the ad with the push of a mouse button, but that thinking appears to be wrong.

According to a new study by FreeWheel, the length of a video ad had little impact on the ad’s completion rate. What did have a huge impact was the length of the video itself.

Long-form content (20+ minutes) had the best completion rates regardless of the ad length, both topping 82%. Short-form content, which is currently the most popular form of professional content, peaked at a completion rate of 61%.

I’ve never been a big fan of adding as many “friends” to my social networks as possible. Why add unwanted noise to my socially-connected world?

Well, I’m now even more glad that I’ve been selective with who I friend and follow because Google just shoved everyone into my search results.

First, social search results will now be mixed throughout your results based on their relevance (in the past they only appeared at the bottom). This means you’ll start seeing more from people like co-workers and friends, with annotations below the results they’ve shared or created. So if you’re thinking about climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and your colleague Matt has written a blog post about his own experience, then we’ll bump up that post with a note and a picture:

Thanks to Peter Kafka of All Things Digital’s MediaMemo, the world can see how Twitter is trying to educate people to use (to Twitter this is the code word for ‘pay for’) their Promoted Tweet service which is not exactly setting the ad world on fire as of yet. He does a great job of summarizing the video here.

The video is 40 minutes long but the biggest takeaway is at the 35 minute mark where the Twitter rep spins how some people will not like the ads and they will be vocal about it. In other words, your ads will catch some flak so you better be ready. But don’t worry, it’s just a few people overall and we want to help you turn a problem into an opportunity! How nice.