Marketing Pilgrim

This past week saw rumors of a stratospheric Groupon valuation ($25 billion) as well the New York Times’ great paywall experiment being announced. While we wrote a fair amount covering the Internet marketing news landscape there were a few items that did get the attention you think they may have deserved. Either that or we ignored them because they weren’t interesting but now they are interesting because we need them. So many options.

Facebook Used to Thwart a Robbery. Here’s the video version for you to ponder just how poorly the 911 system must be considered in the Cartersville, GA area (via cnet).

Microsoft is viewed as more ethical than Apple, Google or Facebook – Not even sure how Facebook got into a discussion about ethics unless it was one about having few if any.

Most people use a search engine because they’re looking for an answer to a question, but counter intuitively, most people won’t type an actual question into the query field.

“Who originally sang If You Don’t Know Me By Now,” becomes original, singer, If You Don’t Know. “What can I do on a visit to California?” becomes tourist, California.

But the Q&A format is the basis for Ask.com and it ties in to content sites such as eHow and Yahoo Answers so comScore decided to take a closer look at the folks who do use Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How in their queries.

When comparing January 2011 to January 2010, their survey found that “How” was the most often used qualifier from the list. How accounted for 431 million searches up 27% from the prior year. And then there’s How’s close cousin, How To.

The gamification of the digital world was an idea that popped up quite a few times at last week’s SXSW conference. Much of the discussion revolved around a presentation by SCVNGR creator Seth Priebatsch who was quoted as saying, “Game dynamics are too powerful to leave bottled up in games.”

Think about the amount of time the digitally connected adult spends playing games on his phone, online or on a game system. People have been known to spend an entire weekend working their way through the World of Warcraft and have you had enough of those Farmville updates you keep getting from your Facebook friends?

Oliver Burkeman of The Guardian says;

The American Red Cross has used mobile systems and the generosity of some major brands to help raise $2.6 million for relief efforts in Japan. First and foremost, that is great for the people who are suffering. Secondly, it is a testament to the power of mobile and what the possibilities might be.

Mobile Commerce Daily reports

The American Red Cross is committed to raising money via mobile for the victims of the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan last week.

Microsoft and Millennial Media are showing their support by donating mobile banner space in support of the Red Cross’ efforts. As of now, banners that take consumers to mobile landing pages promoting the text-to-donate call-to-action are running on WL Hotmail, VZW Today, WL Messenger, VZW Social Media, MSN Homepage, MSNBC Business, CNBC, VZW Weather and MSN Money.

The Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that Yahoo is getting ready to sell its Delicious service for what seems like a mere pittance and that the buyer would be a strategic partner, possibly StumbleUpon.

SAI reports

Yahoo is about to close a deal to sell bookmarking site Delicious for $1-$2 million, says a source familiar with the discussions.

Our source isn’t sure what company is buying it, but says it’s a “strategic partner,” something like StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon just raised a fresh $17 million round, so it could easily afford Delicious. We called StumbleUpon for comment and haven’t heard back.

Last year, Eventbrite took a stab at putting a dollar figure on the worth of Facebook and Twitter followers. Now, five months later, they’re digging a little deeper into the data to discover why and when we share.

To begin with, let’s look at the data from October of 2010. Eventbrite sells tickets online and what they’re measuring is social ecommerce through the use of “Dollars Per Share” (DPS). Back in 2010, they found that a share on Facebook generated an average of $2.53 in sales, Twitter was $0.43 and Linkedin was $0.90. Factoring in email sharing, they figured that their average DPS for all social media combined was $1.78. Not bad for a campaign that only costs you the man-hours.