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Customer Insight Tops List of Social Media Expectations

posted on April 5, 2011

When asked what they expected to get out of social media followers, most of the brand marketers surveyed went with insight over money.

eMarketer took a look at this July 2010 survey and they made this easy to read chart that you see here on the right.

As you can see, less than half of the respondents expected to see a short-term or long-term increase in sales due to social media. I’m sure they’d be happy to see that gain, but I expect the response was more about the reality not the hope.

The reality is that we don’t really know what kind of impact social media can have on brands because there just isn’t enough data. Many companies have tried to qualify the ROI per Facebook fan or Twitter follower, but the truth is we don’t have a solid way of quantifying social media behavior.

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Google to Become Even More Engineer Centric

posted on April 5, 2011

Google is changing. Not only has the Larry Page as leader era officially begun but there has been a surprise exit as well. Jonathan Rosenberg , a senior vice president who has been with Google since 2002 is leaving the company. Apparently he was not in line with Page’s desire to have long-term commitments from the executive leadership of Google. Rosenberg planned to leave the company when his daughter went to college in 2013 which in Internet years is about a decade away but looks like that’s not good enough.

Instead Google is starting to remake itself in the image that Page has for the company. According to John Paczkowski of All Things Digital we can expect much more change at the Goog in the future

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LivingSocial Living High on $400 Million in Funding

posted on April 5, 2011

The online deals space is certainly heating up as more and more marketers get in the game. The decision for many is whether they want to build their own version of a deals site or whether they want to use one of the big names in the space.

For the most part, the biggest name in the space is Groupon. They are in the news constantly for a variety of reasons which are a mix of good (tremendous growth) and bad (poor executive decisions about marketing etc) but they are the de facto industry leader.

Unlike the search marketing game though Groupon’s position is less than bulletproof since the ability to copy the process isn’t a high barrier to entry. What is tough is scale and that’s where Groupon has the edge over most little guys.

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Marketing Pilgrim Welcomes Our New SEO Channel Sponsor

posted on April 5, 2011

We are excited to announce SEOmoz as our new channel sponsor for the SEO Channel at Marketing Pilgrim. We are partnering with SEOmoz to bring our readers great SEO information to help stay on top the complex world of search engine optimization. SEOmoz joins Trackur who currently sponsors our Reputation channel.

At Marketing Pilgrim we are looking to partner with world class organizations like SEOmoz for other news and information channels like PPC, social media, web analytics, Internet law, mobile, local, search industry and more. With the Internet space being so dynamic and ever changing our readers are looking for information in all areas of Internet marketing space so that they can perform their duties armed with the most current data to keep them ahead of the competition. By putting the news into these channels our hope is to help readers make sense of the news through it being organized in the areas they are most interested in.

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Netflix, WebMD Make the List of Most Successful Digital Media Companies

posted on April 4, 2011

paidContent has put together a list of what they think are the Top 50 Most Successful Digital Media Companies in the US. They based their decisions on which companies were bringing in the most money from online content and online advertising (estimated at times) and on the company’s strategy and future.

Not surprisingly Google, Yahoo, Apple and Microsoft took the top four places in that order. Fifth place went to Netflix with their estimated revenue of $1.5 billion-plus. Netflix recently lined up some big deals with the studios and now that they’re doing well with their streaming arm, the future looks very bright for this ground-breaker that is slowly clearing the field of all competition.

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AOL Shifts from Freelance to Full-Time

posted on April 4, 2011

Freelancers have been turning out copy for magazines, TV and online sites for many, many years. Some of the copy isn’t the best, but there are plenty of great freelancers out there who know how to craft a great story and can do it from inside the walls of their own home (or the local Starbucks.)

Arianna Huffington doesn’t agree. That’s the rumor, anyway. According to Business Insider, AOL, under the leadership of Huffington, is doing away with freelancers. Not only are they looking to work with only full-time employees, but one source says, those employees are expected to be at their desks at 9:00 am.

Business Insider posted an email that was sent to them from a former freelancer and I found this paragraph particularly interesting.

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Local Business Marketing Dollars and Conflicting Local Data

posted on April 4, 2011

We talk about the importance of local Internet marketing here at Marketing Pilgrim pretty regularly. What is interesting is that only 25% of our readers that responded to our recent survey were looking for local Internet marketing information (you can still complete the quick survey here and we would appreciate it :-) ) .

I find that fascinating because the reality of the market place is that no matter how big or small your business is, purchasing decisions have a decidedly local bend to them. In other words, everyone should be concentrating on local as it applies to their business whether you are big or small.

Recently, BIA/Kelsey reported on how local marketing dollars are shifting from traditional to online channels. This chart provided by eMarketer shows this slow change.