Marketing Pilgrim

Poor Bing.

All of the search and social media world is in a tizzy over changes at Facebook and Google’s response to those changes. It’s as if these two are the only players in the online space.

The sad fact is that, in the eyes of most, they are (but let’s let Twitter join the club as well).

So whenever Bing does something pretty cool like their new Action Buttons in search results, the news gets buried. Well, you have been told. If you go and do certain searches over at Bing the search engine allows you to take actions based on that search from inside the engine itself. From the Bing blog

Helping you get things done faster is a big focus for us at Bing.

Facebook has a very unique place in the psyche of the Internet consumer. There is this oddly intense love / hate relationship that almost always ends in submission by the user, acceptance of whatever changes have come down the pike and even the eventual forgetting what the complaining was about in the first place.

Honestly, it’s a bit annoying. Facebook users are starting to sound very much like Google haters. They recognize the importance of the platform and services as they relate to what they do in their lives but seem to want to see the mighty fall in process. I often wonder what would happen if so many Facebook haters got their wish and the service just got up and went away. That would be an interesting day because I suspect not too many of them would be genuinely happy.

In its purest sense the idea of marketing automation is a good thing. The more you can automate a process to help achieve a desired result the better. Boiling marketing and sales down to repeatable and scalable events is the dream of all marketers because we all know the pressure to get more from less these days. Automation is supposed to help people do more with less so marketers are flocking to it.

As with most theories, however, the reality of the situation soon comes to life and the chinks in the marketing automation armor can be exposed as quickly as they can be celebrated. The trouble is that while it’s easy to sit back and say “if person X does Y then we give them Z to complete the sales process” those pesky people aren’t as similar as is required for a process to be repeatable AND successful over and over again.

When you travel around the internet, you come across ads that are somewhat personalized. You’ll see banners for sites you’ve previously visited and ads for stores in your neighborhood because advertisers know where you live. But how about an ad that responses to the weather at your location or your age?

Enter Eyeview. They’re a provider that specializes in highly-targeted video ads. Here’s a panel from a Target ad customized by gender and weather.

The ads begin the same but change to show the location of the nearest Target store and then an appropriate item. In this case, a short-sleeve Glee t-shirt for the sunny, Southern California girl, and a cozy, long-sleeve shirt for the guy in rainy Chicago.

Facebook is about to change and this time it’s not about a shake-up of your sidebar or a reshuffling of how things show up on your wall. This time, the change is big. It’s a whole new way to connect with the world and share the things that are important to you.

It’s about the timeline, the ticker and a whole new series of open graph apps. I spent the morning listening to Mark Zuckerberg present the new Facebook on a LiveStream from the f8 conference and here’s what I came away with.

TIMELINE

Timeline is one of two big, structural changes to Facebook. It’s meant to tell the story of your life by presenting everything you’ve done (and mentioned on Facebook) in chronological order. It really is a timeline – just like the ones they made you use in history class when you were in school.

InMotion Hosting has put together an infographic that tackles one of the most necessary yet under-utilized aspects of Internet marketing: the SEO audit. It’s under-utilized for the simple reason that many people don’t understand the importance of taking this step before moving forward with any SEO activities. Oh and they don’t want to spend the money to have it done, either.

The trouble is that if you don’t invest to know what’s working or not for your SEO efforts then you may end up “fixing” something in the process that was actually working.

SEO’s face this dilemma with clients all the time because they are fighting uphill in many cases due to the wonderful reputation the SEO industry enjoys amongst the uninitiated. Of course, some of that skepticism is well deserved but let’s not nit-pick!

Now doing all of this in 20 minutes if you don’t know what you are looking for? Not likely but, hey, it sounds nice. Click through to check this out.

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