Marketing Pilgrim

Last night, Syfy premiered their new super hero series Alphas, along with a set of super social apps.

In the week leading up to the series, GetGlue offered a Coming Soon badge which is now “out of print.’ As a reward for checking in weekly, gluers can now earn up to 14 additional badges including one for each character and one for each of their Alpha powers.

Syfy is running an even higher profile promotion with Shazam, the music identification app that now works for TV shows, too. During the show, viewers were prompted to point their iPhones at the TV screen, then activate the Shazam button. The app listens to make sure you’re really watching Alphas, then returns a lists of additional goodies. In this case, it was behind the scenes videos, wallpaper downloads and a sweepstakes link. It also returns an Alphas playlist that lists the songs from the episode along with iTunes download links so you can own them only seconds after exclaiming, “hey, I love that song.”

We are early on in the days of Google+ but the gamesmanship is already well underway. People are jockeying for position. Robert Scoble continues to try to prove that he is the most important person in the world and others are looking for early Google+ leverage.

One interesting use of the service comes from Paul Allen who is the founder of Ancestry.com. Why is this important? Well, I have noticed that during my TV time recently I have seen a significant number of Ancestry.com ads running. They ain’t cheap I suppose.

So Allen looks like he is trying to see how much “interest” he can conjure up through his count of Google+ getting to the 10 million user mark. His effort has landed him at the top of the Techmeme ladder at the time of this writing.

Here at Marketing Pilgrim, we’re big fans of TechCrunch. You’ll notice we link to a lot of their stories.

Still, like others, we’re not quite sure whether we like or hate their new design–and new logo. Of course, no one likes their favorite web sites when they change–just ask Facebook or Twitter!

So, instead of adding to the many critics, we thought we’d pay homage to TechCrunch the best way we know how. With our tongue in our cheek, but sincere admiration in our hearts, we present the new Marketing Pilgrim logo:

What do you think?

Update: We switched the logo back, but here’s a reminder of how awesome it looked on our site:

MarketingPilgrim.com With Our New Logo

Google has floated the Google Offers trial balloon in cities like Portland, OR (which appears to be Google’s guinea pig for all things local) but now it is hitting the true top tier cities with its beta introduction in San Francisco and New York City. So we can say that Google Offers are coast to coast in a “if you ignore most of the middle of the country” sort of way.

This video from the Official Google blog highlights a few of the businesses that are part of this latest offer from Google.

Of course, these classic urban settings are best suited for the on the go offer finder so this is how the cool kids will see offers on their mobile device.

I’m an efficiency nut. I change little things about my processes and tools just to shave a few seconds off of tasks I repeat over and over again each day. I even use a square monitor because I feel I lose too much time moving my mouse across a wide screen. All these little savings add up and there’s no better way to increase your work efficiency than with some juicy browser extensions.

Since Chrome is my browser of choice these days, I decided to write this post about Google’s browser. There are similar extensions for Firefox and maybe IE (who knows?) so if you see an extension you like, try searching for a similar extension for your browser. I purposely skipped over most of the SEO tools because those lists have been done over and over again. My goal here is to help all online marketers get more work done in less time.

It’s time for another Dollar Lunch Day thanks to LivingSocial. This time, the daily deal site is taking on San Francisco. On July 13, LivingSocial Instant Deals will go live in the City by the Bay and more than 100 restaurants will offer lunch for $1 to celebrate.

This is the third time LivingSocial is running with this unique promotion so it must be working for them. They report 27,000 $1 lunch vouchers were sold in Washington, D.C. in March and in June 15,000 were sold in Manhattan. Think San Fran can top that?

Tim O’Shaughnessy, CEO and co-founder of LivingSocial thinks it’s the perfect city for the product.