Marketing Pilgrim

“sick of everything coming dependent on FB trend…wouldn’t let me vote unless I registered with my FB….grrrr!”

That sentiment is begin repeated over and over again on America Idol’s official posting board in a thread called “The Online Voting Sucks.” So much for the show’s grand, new social media experiment.

For the first time in its history, Idol offered online voting and Ryan Seacrest pimped it regularly throughout the first two performance shows. But when people flocked to the website to actually cast their votes they ran into a number of problems. Some found a message saying the voting was already closed, some simply couldn’t access the site, likely due to traffic issues, but many were stopped cold by the Facebook requirement.

The Android OS has a slight lead over Apple and BlackBerry in smartphones through January 2011 according to Nielsen. Of course, this doesn’t take into account the supposed Verizon effect which some are wondering if that even happened (it has been awful quiet regarding the end of Android as of late hasn’t it?).

So here is the pretty picture from Nielsen showing the slimmest of margins for Android over Apple. What it doesn’t show is BlackBerry’s rapid descent from top of the heap to nearly south of second place in a relatively short period of time.

Google continues to update and improve its Hotpot offering and it almost feels like they are looking to do it under the radar. Of course, I have talked about how Google couldn’t market their way out of a wet paper bag (unless you live in Portland, OR) so why this is surprises me makes no sense.

At any rate Google has now integrated the ability to update your Twitter account when you review a location in Hotpot or Google Latitude on an Android device. The Google Hotpot blog (or LatLong blog or Mobile blog – talk about duplicate content!) reports

Whether it’s Google Places with Hotpot or Google Latitude, we’re working on helping you connect the people you care about with places you love. Now, when you’re rating your dinner spot using Google Maps for Android, you can share your review with even more people by posting it to Twitter.

If you look at the news in the Internet marketing world over the past 24-48 hours you can start to see why sites like Groupon and LivingSocial are going to need to work to stay ahead of a growing mob of daily deal offers.

Heavyweights like the New York Times have joined the group and yesterday yet another large company put its hat in the ring. That company is Microsoft and it has partnered with The Dealmap to power this offering. From one of yesterday’s press release:

For musicians, MySpace used to be the social network of choice, but now that the stands are empty over there, it’s sort of Facebook or nothing. Enter FanTrail, a new smartphone app with some exciting ideas about marketing to fans. Even if you’re not a musician, keep reading because there’s inspiration here for all of us.

FanTrail is a free application that allows a musician to communicate and sell to his fans on a variety of levels. For the fan, the app acts as a digital newsletter providing social media updates (which can all be updated at the same time with one click), a calendar of events and links to the musician’s music on iTunes. If a user buys through the app, the musician gets a percentage of the price over and above the royalty he makes from iTunes.

If you have a Facebook page with 21 million “likes,” do you really need a company website? Stephen Haines, commercial director of Facebook’s U.K. operation, says no!

Speaking at the Technology for Marketing and Advertising conference in London yesterday, Haines demonstrated the power of Facebook by comparing “likes” to web page views. For example, Starbucks who has 21.1 million likes to 1.8 million site visitors, or Coca-Cola who has 20.5 million likes compared with 270,000 visitors.

CNET, who covered the event, thought there was some merit to the idea.