Marketing Pilgrim

If you’re looking to expand your Twitter universe, you’ve found the right post. While opinions will vary on any list of this sort, I’ve picked out and reviewed my choices for the top 25 online marketers you should be following on Twitter. They are not presented in any particular order so as to prevent any in-fighting with those listed .

I tried to dig in and give you a little more depth provided in most of these kinds of lists and I suspect these folks would love for you to follow them if you are not already.

I hope you enjoy and feel free to add your own favorite online marketers to follow in the comments!

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Google really seems to be changing quite a bit. Ever since the announcement in January of Larry Page’s move to CEO and the ‘official’ date of April 4 having past executive titles have changed to exclude the term search, company direction discussed at length and now there is even, gulp, advertising being run for Google’s Chrome browser.

The browser is the reason for the commercials but the showcase of Google as more than a search engine seems to be the real goal. Check this out.

Are you sensing some changes with Google that are bigger than just the usual making a change in the SERPs? Tell us what you think.

In what some may see as a matter of semantics, Google has made a shift in how they name positions internally with the word search being replaced by the term knowledge. When I first read this I wanted to dismiss it but on second thought that would be pretty hard to do since Google makes almost all its money from search.

So why this shift in terminology from the search engine giant? It could be that the Larry Page era is truly about taking Google beyond the current confines of being just a search company. They have been trying this for a while with various product introductions and little if any true success especially in the area of social. Maybe the shift in titles is about a sea change in the organization to not think search first?

We may be living in the digital age, but the U.S. Postal Service would like to remind you that direct mail campaigns still work. In order to prove their point, they created the Marketing Achievement in Innovation and Leadership (MAIL) Award, solicited nominees through Deliver magazine and chose a winner.

That winner was branding agency Mlicki, and they won for their Blue Octo campaign which had a 10% response rate.

The Blue Octo is a line of waste-water pumps and these guys managed to make it look cool and exciting. Their mailer looked like a classified dossier with reports and photos about sightings of a mysterious Blue Octo creature.

Mlicki creative director John Randle told Deliver;

See the girl in that picture there. She’s happy because she’s getting deals so early in the morning, she’s still in her pajamas! Of course, it could be that she’s unemployed and has no reason to get dressed. And she has no furniture, so she has to use her laptop on the floor. . . .

But no. She’s happy. She’s happy because that old, stodgy bastion of advertising, The Yellow Pages, is now new and hip. The Yellow Pages is now a deal site. Yes. It’s true-ish.

It’s actually yellowpages.com, which is owned by AT&T, and honestly, I have no idea if it’s related to those paperweights that get dropped on your doorstep when you’re not looking. But like I said yesterday, it’s not what’s true, it’s what people believe and people will association yellowpages.com with the Yellow Pages books and that’s good and bad.

At the rate that reports keep flying in about Google ruffling the feathers of governments regarding data collection and privacy you would think the United Nations might set up a subcommittee on Google ‘concerns’.

Now we can add South Korea to the list of governments that feel the need to dig into Google’s efforts in their country as they relate to data and their citizens.

Reuters reports

Google Inc’s Seoul office was raided on Tuesday on suspicion its mobile advertising unit AdMob had illegally collected location data without consent, South Korean police said, the latest setback to the Internet search firm’s Korean operations.

The probe into suspected collection of data on where a user is located without consent highlights growing concerns about possible misuse of private information as the use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets increases.