Marketing Pilgrim

For marketers, the news is too good to be true. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Facebook is thinking about removing the filters on user news feeds. So, instead of Facebook deciding what information a user sees, the user will decide. How radical is that?

This change would mean an open line of communication between a brand or business and every person who “liked” their page. You post a message and everyone who follows your fan page sees it in real time in their news feed.

I hear you saying, isn’t that how it’s supposed to work? Supposed to, but that’s not how it does work.

Our Channels program has been running for a few short months now and it continues to attract some of the best advertisers around.

Today we get to announce the addition of Full Sail University to our Channels program. They will be sponsoring our Social Channel.

As with all of our sponsors we encourage our readers to please visit them and see what they have to offer you, the best readers in the Internet and social media marketing world.

Thank you again to Full Sail University as well as all of our sponsors and advertisers! We couldn’t do this without you!

Marketing Pilgrim’s Social Channel is proudly sponsored by Full Sail University, where you can earn your Masters of Science Degree in Internet Marketing in less than 2 years. Visit FullSail.edu for more information.

As a father I have often wondered about social media students and teachers. I have assurances from my Facebook using child that just the idea of being friends on Facebook with a teacher is weird. A good sign in my opinion but at least one state doesn’t trust their citizens as a whole to come to the same conclusion.

In fact, to safeguard against any social media misdoings between students and teachers, Missouri has enacted a law saying that a social media relationship between teacher and student is illegal.

msnbc reports

Missouri has passed a law making it illegal for state teachers to friend their students on Facebook.

Governor Jay Nixon signed Missouri State Bill 54, which bans students and teachers from communicating and being “friends” on the social networking site. The law was created to prevent inappropriate relationships between children and teachers.

If part of a company’s game plan to defend against a perceived wrong doing against them involves firing off allegations, one would guess that those said allegations should be bulletproof, right?

Maybe Google’s SVP and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond should have done a little more homework before he accused some big names of playing patent pranks on the search company. Here’s the gist of his claim from the Google blog

But Android’s success has yielded something else: a hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents.

Measuring success is one of those social media marketing sticking points that still has most people baffled. Traditional online metrics such as measuring click-throughs doesn’t really give you the full picture because a lot of social media campaigns are about awareness, not action. In other words, they function more like TV commercials than banner ads. This is why TV ratings leader Nielsen is working on bringing “Gross Ratings Points” to Facebook.

As explained in an article published in the Wall Street Journal, Gross Ratings Points are a metric that measures reach — “that is the size of an audience—by the “frequency” with which the audience sees a brand.”

On July 24, Google+ had 25 million unique visitors making it the fastest growing website ever. As Reuters reports, they’re pulling in an average of one million visitors a day with no end in sight.

Facebook took three years to get to that point, but as Reuters also points out, MySpace took only two years to reach that number and look where they are now. Faster isn’t always better.

What’s interesting about this monumental number is that I don’t see any difference in the site than I did when I joined. Actually, it’s worse. As of today, my entire Google+ stream, all the way to the bottom of the page is nothing but posts from the very informative and fun Darren Rowse of ProBlogger. Yes, he’s a talkative guy, and granted I don’t have a lot of people attached to my account, but I have to go back several weeks to see a range of posts from people.