Marketing Pilgrim

The term Facebook privacy is now officially the definition of an oxymoron. Everyone in the Internet marketing industry knows that Facebook plays like they are concerned about privacy because they are always forced to act that way when it’s revealed that they pretty much walk around with their privacy kimono wide open 24/7. I have had developers tell me that they won’t use Facebook at all since just about anyone can just about anything to anyone’s information. Comforting, huh?

Well, talk about being called out! Internet security company Symantec has revealed that Facebook has had a flaw that allows third parties to see a lot more than most people would be comfortable showing to complete strangers.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Now, I can almost guess what will happen with this post. Despite the frenzied level the talk reaches about Groupon’s possible, maybe, kinda, sorta IPO, it seems whenever we post about this “hot” company our readers run for the exits. Why is that? Tell us in the comments if you feel so led.

This time though, the latest Groupon announcement is for Groupon Now which sounds pretty cool actually. Here’s the Groupon promo video to explain this service that could be a real differentiator when it comes to the crowded daily deal space (I’m serious. I’m not just saying that to get you to hang around, honest).

If you live in a urban area where this could happen like the video it’s interesting for sure. Not sure it works so well in a car in suburbia but let’s not quibble.

Social Media and ROI. Should I just stop there? This past weekend, Joe wrote a decisive piece about how the two concepts shouldn’t be used in the same sentence. If you scan even further back, you’ll find me making the same point — though with a thinner blade. That’s why I was very interested to see what was behind this piece from MarketingSherpa: Marketing Research Chart: CMO confidence in social media’s ability to produce ROI

Surely, this would show that most CMO’s agree that social media ROI is like using a pedometer to find out how far I walked in my dreams.

Let’s take a look:

Which statement best describes how you perceive social marketing’s ability to produce a return on investment (ROI) at budget time?

A penny saved may be a penny earned but only if you make under 500K a year. The Affluence Collaborative surveyed wealthy internet users and eMarketer put the results in one of their excellent graphs, which you’ll find below.

As expected, nearly half of the general population follows brands on social media to get coupons and deals, and just under that is the reason of brand loyalty. But as soon as you move into a higher tax bracket, the tide shifts and coupons fall away to only 29%, with 52.3% saying it’s brand loyalty that keeps them hanging on.

This is very good news for luxury brands. It’s actually a nice pat on the back for creating a quality product.

Now take a look at the last item on the list; “Their tweets/posts are entertaining.”

Last week we spoke of the marketing efforts that Google is putting behind their Places offering in six test markets including Portland, Austin, Las Vegas, Madison (WI), Charlotte and San Diego. That post got quite a bit of attention simply because of the subject matter which is Google reaching out to, gulp, market their services.

One part of that offering that was not discussed was the mysterious box that showed up on the steps of most small businesses in those markets. Google sent along one of the kits that was sent to 41,000 businesses in Charlotte to us here at Marketing Pilgrim. We thought the rest of the world might like to see what Google is up to. Once our own Places promo box arrived at the Marketing Pilgrim world headquarters (embellishment alert!) we thought we’d open it up for you too.

Depending on how you look at this, I’m either stating the obvious or going out on a limb, when I say that Google’s rumored new Google Music cloud service will be a dead man walking.

Why?

Here’s the reason:

Google is preparing to show off a new music service at tomorrow’s I/O conference. And like Amazon’s launch earlier this year, the company is doing it without the approval of the major music labels and publishers.

So, you have the weight of Google thrown behind this, but you have two things working against this being a success.

First, history teaches us that when Google launches a media platform without the approval of the actual content providers, it dies pretty quickly. What happened when Google TV launched and didn’t play nicely with the other kids in the TV playground?