Marketing Pilgrim

You can’t walk down the block anymore without stumbling over a study that combines a version of the truth with the PR of a company. The latest target has often been the SMB market as everyone and their distant cousin is trying to get attention for their efforts to cage this elusive animal.

The latest study comes from Constant Contact which is an e-mail marketing company. So we’ll give you three guesses at which is the most effective way for SMB’s to reach their customers and prospects and the first two don’t count. Did you guess e-mail marketing? You get a gold star!

OK, so it was an bad play on words but there is no denying that the Facebook and Bing union is the trump card that Microsoft has on Google when it comes to search results. Bing has announced an even richer search and social experience in search. Bing’s Director of Search, Stefan Weitz, explains more below.

<br/><a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-us&#038;vid=08b7f661-fc34-4167-996a-7a47e47a5f0c&#038;src=SLPl:embed::uuids&#038;fg=sharenoembed" target="_new"title="Bing Brings "Friend Effect" to Search">Video: Bing Brings &#8220;Friend Effect&#8221; to Search</a>

While I know this isn’t original, it’s best that you hear about the changes straight from the engine’s mouth (or press release). Here’s all the fun that Bing and Facebook are bringing your way for search enhancement using social signals.

How important is mobile to your small business? Network Solutions did a survey and found that while most SMB’s are aware of the possibilities, few of them are actually using mobile for marketing.

The first line item is a tricky one. Text messaging can be seen as an invasion of privacy for some mobile users, so this probably isn’t the best place to start.

Listing your company with a location-based website, however, is a quick way to get a mobile boost. Shoot some clear photos of your business, then spend a few hours setting up profiles with Foursquare, Google Places and Facebook Places to start. This is an easy one and should be way higher than 19%.

It’s one thing to read about it, but a whole ‘nother thing to see it put into graphical form. Here’s AdAge’s look at the demographics of social media.

First up is the breakdown of social media users compared to the population of the US. Kind of frightening, actually, to see Facebook so close to the outer rim. I feel like I’m looking at one of those molten lava charts from an old B scifi movie. “We’ve got to find a way to stop the rapid expansion before the Facebook layer breaks through and destroys the world!”

We all get that local is important. The fact that it is so important since for the first 20 or so year of the commercial Internet we have preached that you can see the whole world on the Internet only to find that local is where we actually “do life”.

Google has recognized this push back to the local scene in a huge way with Google Places, its emphasis on local search and the development of its recommendation engine which is now integrated into Google Places.

Last Friday the Google Mobile blog announced that their mobile version of Google News will have a feature called “News Near You” so that you can get the latest local information from your mobile device no matter where you are.

Facebook is likely to always be in the crosshairs of someone or something that will want to get their piece of the Facebook gazillions the old fashioned way: by suing for it.

A group who was trying to ding Facebook on privacy found that the pot at the end of the rainbow was empty for now as their case in a California court was tossed but still allowed to return if there is actually anything to it.

The Register reports

A federal judge has gutted a lawsuit filed against Facebook for allegedly leaking users’ personal information to advertisers on the grounds that they didn’t suffer specific injuries and the leak didn’t run afoul of wiretap and computer fraud statutes.