Marketing Pilgrim

Researchers at Cambridge University in Britain are working on a social media friend prediction system that creates more meaningful connections between people online. I guess we can’t all be working on a cure for cancer and there’s probably more fame and fortune in developing a new kind of social media network so. . .

Their theory is that people often bond over a common love of the same location.

Researcher Salvatore Scellato told Reuters;

“We monitored the behavior of people going to places and the connections they made [on Gowalla]. We found that lots of people who go to the same places end up adding each other as friends, accounting for around 30 percent of new social links.”

There’s a saying that goes, “if Google can’t find you, then your customers can’t find you” and it’s very true. Google finds your site through a process called indexing. The simplified version is this: Google sends smart cyber-spiders out to crawl all over the web and these spiders bring back news of all the new sites and site changes. Google updates its database to include all these news bits and voila, you’re indexed. Now, when Hubert searches Google for neon-green, 80′s rapper pants, he’ll find them at your Ultimate 80′s online store.

That’s the perfect world. In the real world, some sites, blogs in particular, get indexed faster than other sites. Some sites get indexed late or badly due to issues with keywords or graphics that block the text. (Here’s a tip: Google can’t read a graphic, so make sure the name of your site is in the text or meta text.)

This story falls into the “I don’t know how I feel about this one” category. Why? First it’s about a subject that most people don’t readily discuss which is death. Second, it’s the introduction of technology into an area that seems very weird but also very helpful all at once.

The Seattle Times has published a report of a cemetery that offers a unique service. That service is putting QR codes on headstones in their cemetery so that visitors to the gravesite can be more ‘engaged’ with their visit.

Wave a smartphone over the bench-style headstone of Edouard Garneau at Holyrood Cemetery in Shoreline and you’ll learn he was a collision-repair specialist and successful businessman who loved to barbecue, fly his airplane and travel.

The social media marketing world is an interesting place. Just take a quick look at the top players and their business.

Facebook – Everyone wonders when the IPO will occur while the privately held company’s revenue numbers are talked and speculated about more than most public companies. Secondary market ‘trading’ of Facebook shares is the norm amongst the privileged. In the end, most people don’t know the truth about Facebook other than the warm fuzzy way that it handles its users’ privacy .

Twitter – It is still unclear just how and exactly how much money Twitter is making, can make or will make. Despite all the moves to look like an actual company it still gives off the feeling that it wouldn’t know a plan to generate revenue if one came up to it and kicked it in the shins.

Publishers love to have some control over what people see when it comes to their content. That’s natural. Google News is run by an algorithm and not human editors so as with most things in an algorithmic setting, the end user settles on what they are given and, in most cases, probably don’t know how the information was chosen, just that it was.

Google News has experimented with a feature called Editor’s Picks but have now made it an official part of the offering. In short, publishers can now put together an RSS feed of the content of their choice to be featured in Google News along the right side of the page. It looks like this.

The Google blog reports

From devastating disasters to celebrity slips, a single mention on Twitter can turn into a trend in a matter of minutes. That’s why the micro-blogging site has been credited as the source for major breaking news stories and hundreds of high-profile rumors. Like it or love it, Twitter is a force to be reckoned with, so how is Google going to provide real-time news without it?

Last month, Google removed their Realtime search option after failing to come to an agreement with Twitter. They were still able to pull in posts from Facebook, but let’s be frank and say that Facebook isn’t exactly a bastion of breaking news.