Marketing Pilgrim

Take a look at the women in your life, (go ahead, they’ll appreciate it) and notice who it is they all turn to when they need advice about anything from movies to make-up.

If you’re living in a typical world, you’ll find that a few women in the circle stand out as influencers. They’re the ones who always seem to know the latest trend, where to find the hottest deal and what’s coming out later this month.

Marina Maher Communications (MMC), refers to these women as the “Influence-Hers” and to marketers, they’re like finding a golden ticket to the Wonka factory. The bad news is that, like Wonka tickets, there are only a few of them. According to MMC’s recent survey of over 2,000 women, only 12% of women fall into this category. The good news is, they’re open to listening to your message and if they like you, they like you a lot.

A post today by Andy Beal outlines the efforts by Facebook to create a smear campaign against Google by hiring PR giant Burson-Marsteller to carry out the dirty work.

First, while I know it’s naïve to think that large respected PR firms like Burson-Marsteller wouldn’t take on a project that is an active smear campaign, they are just as much to blame in taking Facebook’s money to pull a stunt like this but I digress.

I think it’s very important to remember several things about this whole deal.

1. No one outside of Silicon Valley and the ‘industry’ will even know this is going on.

2. Facebook, at the end of the day, shouldn’t be trusted by anyone who is really paying attention but that still doesn’t mean people won’t still need and use the service

Grab some popcorn and pull up a chair because there’s nothing quite like a conspiracy story that involves Facebook hiring a high-profile PR firm to spread a smear campaign about Google to the mainstream media.

For the past few days, a mystery has been unfolding in Silicon Valley. Somebody, it seems, hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy. Burson even offered to help an influential blogger write a Google-bashing op-ed, which it promised it could place in outlets like The Washington Post, Politico, and The Huffington Post.

We could stop right there and this would be a juicy enough story, but it gets better. Not only is the company behind this anti-Google media campaign none other than Facebook–pot calling the kettle black, anyone?–but apparently Facebook has admitted it hired Burson-Marsteller to run the negative campaign.

If you’re more interested in connecting with folks in your neighborhood than folks around the world, have I got a site for you. Yatown is a new, hyper-local social media site that’s all about cluing you in to what’s happening down the street and around the corner.

It was created by Christopher Nguyen and Kevin Lim who both spent time with Google before moving on to other internet properties. Says Lim,

“We see our neighbors and wave at them all the time, but are limited to just a few houses nearby, and have no convenient way to connect with others who may know what’s going on with that downtown construction, or what that traffic jam was all about, or who’s the best plumber around. There is no easy way to announce a garage sale to the neighborhood online, no easy way to promote the school fundraiser other than using a mailing list and no easy way to reach out to the neighborhood and campaign for school-funding measures.”

A man in Egypt named his daughter Facebook, which maybe isn’t any stranger than Blanket or Moon Unit, but what are they going to call her for short? If they call her Face, people will think she was named after an A-Team character. Maybe Bookie?

I know many of you don’t like it, but Facebook is gaining popularity all over the world and comScore has a chart to prove it. Look.

Chart: comScore_Facebook Global Growth

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Photos: iStockphoto

Across the board, Facebook usage is up 43% and look at Asia and the Middle East, the growth percentage is encouraging. . . or discouraging, depending on your point of view.

Have you updated your status today?

“You Can Do Everything on the Web.”

That’s one of the slogans you’ll find inside the video announcing the public, mainstream launch of Google’s Chromebooks–laptops that run Chrome instead of a normal operating system.

And, with 160 million web users already surfing the web via Google’s Chrome browser, the search giant is hoping there’ll be a ready-made market for laptops that require no long start-up times, no software loading, no updates, and no risk of losing all your data if you throw your laptop in a river (Google’s example, not mine!)

The first Chromebooks will be manufactured by Acer and Samsung and don’t look too bad at all!