Marketing Pilgrim

Thanks to the invention of the smartphone, we can now keep on top of everything our friends are doing, all the time. Oh, and we can even call and speak to them, too! But why bother when you have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the like?

This past August, Prosper asked 294 smartphone and tablet users about their mocial usage, and though I’m not sure less than 300 is a good sampling, I’m pretty sure these numbers are in the ballpark.

Here’s the big one. 69.4% of users say they regularly read status updates from others and 65.6% look at photos on their phone. Updating their own social media status was slightly less important (53.4%)

For marketers, 26.5% said they use their device to “go to retailers’ pages to find deals while shopping.” Not bad.

In a move that mirrors a Twitter follow and also allows for a new type of content publishing and sharing that gives the look of Google+ in many ways, Facebook is further remaking itself to act like others.

While this sounds like a copycat move (and let’s face it, it is in response to the competitive pressures that the social network has faced in recent months) it’s smart for Facebook to introduce this kind of offering.

The Facebook blog describes the subscribe offering like this.

Until now, it hasn’t been easy to choose exactly what you see in your News Feed. Maybe you don’t want to see every time your brother plays a game on Facebook, for example. Or maybe you’d like to see more stories from your best friends, and fewer from your coworkers.

No one at Facebook would claim what was stated in the headline. Instead they would be quick to say that they had this change in the making for quite some time and there is no connection to what Google is doing over at Google+. I get that because that’s what companies do when they have been “one-upped”: they lie. By now we all know the game so it doesn’t matter like it used to (which says a lot about how far backwards we are heading at times).

Facebook’s new method for organizing friends in the Facebook system was rolled out yesterday and the post from the Facebook blog gives the following description of the changes

According to AllThingsD, AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft unveiled plans to take on Google by joining forces to sell each other’s ad inventory. The plan is to try a collective approach to battling Google and others.

The strategy is also designed to help them claw back some ad spending that has ended up in the hands of ad networks in recent years.

Executives from all three companies briefed a group of top Web publishers and ad buyers about the plan at a dinner presentation last night in Manhattan. AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft hope to convince big Web properties to share some of their ad inventory as well, and to get big ad holding companies to funnel some of their purchases through the consortium.

This post comes from our Social Channel sponsor Full Sail University.

Last week I overheard a mom telling her toddler to “use your words.” They were in the store and the little guy was pointing at something he wanted. The mom guided him into using his words to tell her specifically what it was he wanted.

Words guide us through communication. They bring forth and maintain the integrity of our message.

If we simply point and hope that our audience knows what we want, we are leaving much of the interpretation up in the air. Instead, if we use our words to deliver an effective message, the words are doing the work.

As marketers, we must pay attention to the words we use to deliver our message.

Facebook ads. Facebook brand pages. Facebook e-commerce. The forces are working hard to make the Face the place for marketers, but according to a new study by Kantar Media Compete, Twitter has them beat.

The numbers come from the quarterly “Online Shopper Intelligence Study” which looks at cross-channel shopping behavior. The survey was given to 2,574 online purchasers who shopped between July 14 and August 8, 2011 and here’s what they found out.

35% of respondents said that Twitter feeds had an influence on their purchase decisions. Only 23.5% had the same thing to say about Facebook.