Marketing Pilgrim

Facebook has been busy lately with sweeping privacy and sharing changes which are in response to the ripple that Google+ has sent through the tech writer technologist Scoble following social media world with it’s initial “success”.

Now the social media leader has decided to scrap its Deals offering. This comes on the heels of their Places feature getting the boot as well. It looks like Facebook has decided to go back to its roots and try to help people communicate better with friends, family etc.

Reuters reported last Friday

“After testing Deals for four months, we’ve decided to end our Deals product in the coming weeks,” the company said on Friday in a statement emailed to Reuters.

When Google announced their latest algorithm update codename “Panda” the jokes came out of the woodwork to tease the name. But the reality was that this update impacted the SERPs big time. A lot of major sites suffered traffic loss due to their rankings falling. When that happened a lot of SEOs were scrambling to figure out what happened and what they could do as a “work around” to get their respect pride rankings back. What amazed me as I watched all this unfold were the number of SEOs asking on Twitter if anyone had found a solution to the Panda update. The reality is, the solution was right in front of them, they just didn’t see it.

A Lesson in Kung Fu

We’ll take any insight from Google that we can get, right? Even if it’s just a nice little marketing piece that attempts to describe why and in what manner some Google algorithm changes are made, in between the constant reminder messages of “we do what is good for our users”. It’s much less subtle version of when they used to add single frame “subliminal” messages in movies for products. But at least it’s something different.

A few weeks ago I had lunch with a couple of SEOs. Both of them own their own businesses. We discussed briefly a specific niche that they had both worked in and they both mentioned how it was extremely competitive in the search engines. I remember one of them saying that because it was so competitive there was no chance for a new company to come in and compete.

Our discussion shifted to affiliate marketing and the huge potential for SEO’s to do well with it. Once again they both mentioned that all of the lucrative niches are already being dominated, and there wasn’t much point to getting started in them.

It really feels like a horse race now. Google has added new functionality that makes sharing links to Google+ faster and more targeted.

With the new third party widget, you can add a comment before posting to Google+ (just like Facebook) but you can also choose which circle of friends will see the post (better than Facebook).

This new functionality gave me a whole new outlook on Gooogle+ and their circle system. Before this, I only saw the circles as a way of categorizing the relationship. People I work with, family members, friends, people I’d like to work with.

Now, I see new possibilities. Movie Fans, TV Fans, Scrapbookers. Having said that, I still don’t like Google+’s search function. Is it me, or is there no way to search for people who have the same interests so I can put them in my interest circles?

Word of mouth is one of the best means of marketing a product, but sometimes the process needs a little help to get started. Help in the form of cold, hard cash. For a long time, the Pay-for-Posts business was considered only slightly less shady than buying watches from a guy who carries his stock in his coat.

A few years ago, I wrote a paid post for one of my blogs and Google promptly slapped me with a drop in my page rank (does anyone care about page rank anymore?) and placement in the search returns.

Now, paying for posts, Tweets, Facebook shoutouts or video mentions is not only acceptable, it’s good business.