Marketing Pilgrim

The more I use any of Google’s voice products the more I am getting addicted. From free phone calls to all things voice activated on my Android device it makes life easier and, depending upon your situation, even a little safer. Oh it’s pretty darn reliable as long as you talk to it like you are talking to someone who doesn’t understand English (which is slowly and clearly, not loudly).

At first, I figured this was just perfect for the mobile environment but there have been times where sitting at my laptop or a desktop (only if something has gone horribly wrong does that happen anymore) that I want some map info and I have encountered some spelling concerns or just plain old fashioned laziness.

Facebook has teamed up with ticket industry monopolist wannabe Ticketmaster to help event attendees learn where their friends or other people of interest may be sitting for an event. The interactive map using Facebook friends as the way to see who’s sitting where (of course, if you are using Ticketmaster you probably aren’t one of the cool kids who get the good seats through other channels) was introduced this week. Notice the emphasis placed on privacy concerns in the Ticketmaster video.

Admittedly, this is pretty nifty although I would likely never use it. I can, however, see where the right kind of person could find this a neat tool. As for its actual use? The article from Digital Trends sums it up pretty well.

This one falls into the category of “I can see some dotted line connections here, maybe but to draw broad conclusions like this is stupid” category.

According to a study by Columbia University’s (that’s right, the Ivy league school that is supposed to be a place for really smart people) National Center on Addiction and Drug Abuse, it’s more likely that kids who are active in social networking will use drugs. Gee, I am so glad someone finally put two and two together to get five.

Here’s a sample of the findings. The premise is that if teens have seen others drinking and using drugs in pictures on social networking outlets how likely are they to do it themselves or be involved with people that do.

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MySpace has 70 million active global users but you wouldn’t know it to look a the site. In the past few years, they’ve gone from being a hub of personalized social activity, to a billboard for big entertainment brands to. . . the laughing stock of the internet world.

But MySpace’s new owners could be laughing all the way to the bank and sooner than you think.

Talking to AdAge, Al Dejewski, the new senior VP-global marketing says that MySpace started out on a clear path but lost its way as it grew. Now, the new owners are ready to clear away the brush and strike out all over again – with music as their one and only map.

Have you clicked on a display ad today? The odds are you haven’t since, “99.8% of users who view an average display ad don’t click.” But if you spent any time at all on the internet today, you probably saw dozens of ads and maybe you even remember a couple of them. See, that’s the interesting thing, you don’t have to click an ad to remember it and clicking doesn’t mean you bought something when you got there. And yet, clickthroughs are still our chief means of measuring ad success.

Moat wants to change that with their “No Clicks Campaign.” Their position is that an ad can be engaging without being clicked and they use a heat map to prove it.

In true Internet fashion, Facebook has announced its latest f8 conference will happen in San Francisco September 22.

Facebook has used their infrequent f8 conferences to make big announcements with their last one being held in April 2010. As TechCrunch points out

The last f8, which took place in April 2010, was absolutely huge: it featured the launch of Facebook’s Open Graph API and the now-ubiquitous Like button, as well as several of Facebook’s social widgets.

It also saw the launch of Instant Personalization — a bold feature that allowed select third party sites to access some of your Facebook data as soon as you landed on them (the opt-out nature of the feature drew plenty of criticism).

We expect to see similarly major announcements at this event.