Marketing Pilgrim

Using your Groupon coupon for 50% off today? No problem, sir. I’ll just hit this button on the cash register and the machine will do the math for me.

Oh yes, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, Groupon is in talks with the major cash register manufacturers to have Groupon buttons added to all their machines.

The article goes on to say that Groupon is testing a number of avenues that “will let merchants account more efficiently for Groupon transactions and returns.”

Returns? Didn’t know you could do that? I’d like to return this tan, please. It’s a bit too orange for my liking. . .

Groupon is big, but is it that big that they need their own button? Says Bloomberg,

Day two of PubCon Austin started with attendees stumbling from shuttle buses and rental cars into the conference. The chamber-of-commerce 50 degree sunny weather coaxed a few winces from those who had a little too much fun at the Internet Marketing Party with @affiliatetip and @btabke the night before, but the mood was positive as attendees prepared for another day of grade A online marketing training.

I b-lined for the coffee station, desperate for a caffeine boost to help me push through the morning sessions. After filling my cup and snagging a tasty muffin, I settled into the main conference room to catch the keynote for the day.

The Search Industry – A View From Inside & Out
Speakers: Daniel Boberg, Tim Mayer

Main Points:

The 1970’s was referred to as the time of the ‘Me’ generation. It was a time where people were starting to look out for #1 after the 60’s mantra of trying to enact social change through better chemicals. Depending on who you talk to, this move to each person being encouraged to be the center of their own universe marks either the beginning of a dark age or an age of individual enlightenment.

So what am I getting at? Well, I am preparing myself for the onslaught of the ultimate expression of ‘me’ as the social media world floods Austin, TX for SXSW and strains the area’s bandwidth with tweets and updates starting with “I am with”, I am at” “I am the god of” etc etc. It is likely that this year’s event will be loudest echo chamber ever created by mankind.

TechCrunch picks up on an interesting lawsuit just filed.

It appears that MasterObjects is suing Amazon for patent infringement over its use of instant search results. You know what they are; you start typing your search query and then Amazon suggests what you may be trying to find. It looks like this:

Anyway, what’s interesting is that MasterObjects names only Amazon as a defendant. Interesting, because Google, Bing and many others offer instant search results like this. So why aren’t they being named in this lawsuit?

Well, we don’t have official word, and MasterObjects may not want to tip their hand, but I have a theory.

<Queue conspiracy music>

If there is any subject that riles up the readership of Marketing Pilgrim or any other Internet marketing news outlet it’s the occasional ‘death of SEO’ call to arms. It’s the time when those with the most vitriol like to come out and defend the practice and call the person writing about it an idiot and many other sundry terms. It’s a time for release and anger by the SEO community at those who ‘don’t know anything’ about the practice. In short, it’s great theater that produces nothing of substance.

The latest version of this ‘SEO is a black art and ruins the online world for the common man (and journalist)’ mantra comes from the Ivy League of all places. Richard J. Tofel has written an article for Harvard’s Nieman Foundation entitled, “Someday the sun will set on SEO – and the business of news will be better for it”. Pretty provocative title for a guy who is writing for the art rather than the traffic, huh?

Put this one in the “surprised it hasn’t happened before now column,” Skype will start showing ads on their desktop application beginning this week.

Skype says that the 650 x 170 pixel ads will run only on the profile home page but given that they added an enormous, useless box to the top of their chat screens, it’s likely that this will soon be ad space, too.

Despite the amount of real estate the ads will take up, they really aren’t that intrusive as long as they remain graphical. But Skype says they’ll be happy to run video ads and that can get annoying seeing as the whole purpose of the app is to communicate (listen) to others. If customers have to wait for the car commercial to end before they can dial, that’s going to be a problem.