Marketing Pilgrim

If you’re looking for mom, forget the kitchen, check Facebook. She’s probably over there right now, playing games, “liking” for coupons and tagging embarrassing baby pictures of you for all your friends to see.

The January 2011  “How US Moms Share and Spread Information” survey by Lucid Marketing says that 93% of the moms that answered the survey use Facebook and 36% use Twitter.

Blogging, once the hottest trend with online mommies, now sits at only 34% but what’s really odd is that 20% of moms said they still use MySpace. Really? Must be all those Shirley Partridge moms who have their own rock band.

I know people who literally had a case of the vapors when they heard that bookmarking site Delicious was shutting down, but today they are breathing easier. Delicious has been saved.

Thanks go to Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, the founders of YouTube. Before that, they worked for Paypal, so I’d say they understand the internet biz. That’s the good news. The potential bad news is there are likely to be changes ahead and that might start some people gasping for air once again.

Delicious is going to move from Yahoo! to the servers of AVOS, a new company that appears to have been built for this very purpose. According to the FAQ, the change over will happen around July of this year and all users will need to either opt-in to move their bookmarks or lose them in the shift.

Boy oh boy! The good folks of Aol can’t pass up any chance whatsoever for people to wonder what in the world they are up to. As the company has fully entered its “Arianna Online” era (or as history may put it one day, error) it is obvious that Huffington thinks that there are enough free writers out there that they can recruit 8,000 bloggers for their Patch service by May 4. Not a typo, May 4.

Forbes tells us

Arianna Huffington must not be taking that class action lawsuit against her too seriously. Not only is AOL’s new content chief not cutting down on the use of unpaid bloggers, she’s doubling down — literally. Patch, AOL’s network of hyperlocal news sites, is trying to recruit as many as 8,000 bloggers in the next eight days, according to editor in chief Brian Farnham.

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"Why would I want to see what my Facebook friends "liked" or "shared" in my Google results?"

"Who cares whether my website has fewer +1s than the next guy if I have better content?"

"Tweets shouldn’t pass PageRank – what the heck does a Tweet tell me about whether a result answers my query?" 

If you spend anytime following the news on the web you’ve seen the ads. They look like newspaper articles and many even feature the logos of CNN, USAToday and. . . oh, look. . there’s one right there!

Even though they do say “advertorial” on them and they are found in sidebars where banner ads usually hang out, people still think they’re legitimate news sources, so they click and they buy the diet product that is hawked at the end of it all. The FTC says no more. They’ve gone to court to stop ten companies who produce these phony ads and they want to force them refund the money to consumers who fell for the claims.

The FTC charges that the defendants:

Now that we have a lot more data in the hopper, it’s beginning to look like social media isn’t the magic pill many people thought it would be when it comes to marketing.

Today, we have numbers from Outbrain. This is the company that makes the “You Also Might Like” widget that suggests related content at the bottom of a blog post. They examined traffic from 100 million sessions across more than 100 premium publishers in order to find out how people are discovering content and what happens when they get there.

As we’ve seen from other surveys, the majority of traffic comes from search engines (41%) and content sites (31%). They say social media sends 11% of the traffic, which is better than the 1% ForeSee suggested, but it’s still not fabulous.