Marketing Pilgrim

Wednesday is the most misunderstood day of the week.  It’s far enough away from last weekend that the fun memories are fading. It’s far enough away from next weekend to keep you from getting too excited. And then there’s that awful nickname: Hump Day.

Here at Marketing Pilgrim, we say Wednesday deserves a little respect and here’s why. Turns out more people share and click on Facebook posts on Wednesday, than any other day of the week. Take that Friday.

Here’s a chart from a new study by EdgeRank Checker.

Look at Wednesday, beating the pants off all those other days!

EdgeRank took this one step further, measuring the correlation between clicks and other behavior on Facebook. Here’s what they came up with:

There’s no better way to test your resolution than braving a four day conference like PubCon and returning to a pile of emails and backed-up projects. Whether you’re still recovering from PubCon Vegas 2011 (Nov 7-10th) or you just want to prepare for your next post-conference hangover, I have a recipe that might just do the trick.

If you’re one of those people who diligently keep up with your work while you’re at a conference, I would like to remind you that you don’t actually exist.

Answer emails first

Every emergency starts and stops with an email. Take Matt Cutts, who mentioned to an eager crowd gathered for his keynote address, that Google Webmaster tools is going to email you if your WordPress is not the latest version (they do for me now). Ignoring that email could get your site hacked! Check your email first to avoid a major problem.

Google continues to refine its search function. This time it feels like they are almost going back in time by allowing users to get search results based on what they actually type: verbatim.

When you go click on more search tools at Google.com you can choose “verbatim search” and the following typical algorithm assists are NOT used according to the Inside Search blog.

• making automatic spelling corrections
• personalizing your search by using information such as sites you’ve visited before
• including synonyms of your search terms (matching “car” when you search [automotive])
• finding results that match similar terms to those in your query (finding results related to “floral delivery” when you search [flower shops]
• searching for words with the same stem like “running” when you’ve typed [run]

Social Commerce is one of those terms you wouldn’t have found in the encyclopedia a few years ago but it’s currently one of the hottest concepts in online marketing.

Useful Social Media has put together a fun and informative infographic showing the history of social commerce beginning with virtual gift sales on Facebook in 2007.

Here’s a small piece of the large chart:

I love the 32% of people who said they’d shop right from Twitter if they could. Count me in, too!

So where do we go from here? Sudha Jamthe, the Social Media Strategist, Social Commerce for Ebay, says we should be on the look out for three “game changers” in the coming year.

First, the gamification of social.

Sometimes there is so much going on that we figure maybe it’s a good idea to put a few ideas in one post. This is one of those times.

Last week, Google+ added a YouTube widget to the news stream making it even easier to share videos with your friends. Now, it looks like the reverse is about to happen, as YouTube prepares to add Google+ functionality to its site.

The Next Web broke the story thanks to a tip from someone who has seen the light. The biggest change is a navigation sidebar that will make it easier to find what you’re looking for. Like Google+, the sidebar will offer quick links to subscriptions, popular videos and other categories. You’ll also find videos recommended by people in your G+ circles.

It’s a full time job just keeping up with and understanding the reason behind all the changes that Google makes regularly. The latest is and addition to maps that allows you to see the places you have reviewed on a map along with some Google suggestions. The more I read about these changes the more I realize just how little I go out (don’t feel sorry for me because I actually like it that way).

But as with any marketing update in the online space, how I use it doesn’t matter a bit. In a post from the Google Lat Long blog comes an explanation of this newest maps feature.