Marketing Pilgrim

Sometimes it’s the little things that make a big difference, like the new admin bookmarks in Facebook. All they did was add a permanent sidebar category for pages you administer. Now, when you login, you’ll find a link to each page, along with the number of unseen notifications, in the same place every time.

Prior to this change, page bookmarks had a tendency to disappear under a list of apps. There were times where I had to resort to finding my last page update in my own timeline in order to access a page that I hit daily. Not a huge problem in the grand scheme of things, but it’s time and effort wasted when it could be so simple.

I recently saw a pad of scrapbooking paper called Generation X. The designs were all distinctly digital and included Space Invader style video game patterns and scatterings of computers, mobile phones and portable cassette players. Yes, even this craft company knows that Gen Xers love their media.

A new report from eMarketer shows that 88% of Xers are online and that should rise to 90.9% by 2015. What are they doing online? 74.2% are watching videos and that number is also on the rise.

Not only are Gen Xers the biggest pool of video viewers, they also watch more TV than other brackets and are more likely to shop via their mobile phone. Clothing is the most shopped for item with airline tickets and hotel reservations making it into the top five along with books (e or otherwise).

Normally, it wouldn’t be right to say that something done in the Internet marketing and social media world is just a tiny step. Heck that reeks of understatement and maybe even, gulp, the truth.

Well, yesterday Mark Streibeck whose Google Profile gives an indication what his days might be like at Google.

I am managing Gmail frontend development. Which is complex and interesting enough. But with the launch of Google+ it got so much more interesting.

announced that you can now see recent Google+ posts from a Gmail user. Over at Google+ he reported

A first, tiny step: view recent Google+ posts in the Gmail people widget!

You can now see the most recent Google+ post that the sender of the email shared with you in the Gmail people widget – see screenshot below.

OK, first I have a confession. I am a New York Mets fan (all you other Mets fans can say “Hi, Frank” because admitting this addiction is hard considering the state of the team). Not only a Mets fan but one from birth. That means a limited amount of success (I was at Game 7 in 1986 at their old home Shea Stadium when they won their last World Series) and a lot of heartache (name just about any other day in any other season).

So I was pretty interested to get this email announcement from the team.

Continue Reading…

Full Sail University is the sponsor of Marketing Pilgrim’s Social Media Channel.

It’s not news that marketing has made a huge shift to digital in the past 10 years. It’s also clear that many higher education institutions are still struggling to adapt their marketing curriculum to reflect the changing nature of the industry.

David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR, finds it so bad, in fact, that last year he went so far as to call many marketing professors criminals because they weren’t teaching up-to-date material in their classes.

That is unfortunate, because in this economy, there is [a] demand for talented and educated Internet marketers. Simply Hired Job Trends, for instance, show that job postings with ‘Internet marketing’ in the title have increased 180% since November 2009, while ‘social media marketing’ has grown 301%.

Skype, who is in the processing of being bought by Microsoft, just did a little buying of their own. They plunked down a rumored $85 million for group texting company GroupMe.

The GroupMe app was designed to solve a very basic problem — group decision making. If you’ve ever tried to plan a night out with four different you understand the issue. Fred calls Joe and suggests sushi, Joe calls Mary who says she doesn’t like sushi, so Joe texts Fred to say pick somewhere else, but in the meantime Fred is on the phone trying to talk Louise into coming out for sushi with him, while Mary texts Louise telling her Fred’s a loser and they’re all going for pizza. Next thing you know it’s 10:00 at night and no one has left the house yet.