Marketing Pilgrim

Google+ Pages for brands arrived with a decent amount of fanfare back in November and since then it’s been pretty quiet. That doesn’t mean the pages aren’t being used.

BrightEdge just published their December SocialShare report and it has some interesting numbers.

First, 77% of the top 100 brands now have Google+ pages. Sounds good, but the number stood at 61% last month, so it’s not a huge hike. Facebook is at 93% so Google+ is closing in — slowly.

The bigger news story is in followers. Again looking at the top 100 brands, Google+ pages saw an increase of over 50%. The numbers rose from 147K to 222K people in brand circles in December.

Not surprisingly, the most populated brand was Google, with 77,000 folks in the inner circle.

Ever since we discovered that people watch TV with their smartphones in hand, second screen technology has taken off. Some companies are using it to offer an extra layer of content to a movie, while others are strictly for ad purposes.

This past week Hallmark Channel partnered with 44Doors to deliver a holiday gift from Billy Ray Cyrus to his fans. A QR code appeared on the screen during the airing of Cyrus’ movie Christmas Comes Home to Canaan. Accessing the code, allowed fans to download the song “Home” which was written specifically for the movie.

Tim Hayden of 44Doors told MobileMarketer:

“An increased volume of viewers and sustaining that audience throughout Christmas Comes Home to Canaan was a primary objective, while the data analysis from the actual scans and downloads will help the network and advertisers to better understand audience viewing behavior, device preference and geographic location.”

After writing about the FedEx delivery driver that was caught on video, throwing a customer’s expensive computer monitor over a fence, many asked if the video was faked, a FedEx publicity stunt (huh?) or the antics of a competitor.

Well, it turns out that the FedEx video–which now has over 2.6 million views–is legit.

In fact, FedEx has apologized and apparently resolved the issue. Though, unless you went digging around, you wouldn’t know that.

You see aside from these few tweets…

…FedEx doesn’t appear to have taken the issue seriously enough to warrant much of an official apology.

No Facebook update.

No YouTube video response.

No press release.

Not even a blog post. Update: There’s now a blog post.

Get ready for another flood of cries from the wilds of the Internet in 2012 as Facebook introduces sponsored ads to the web version of their users’ news feeds. While many will want to make this sound like it’s the end of the social media world as we know it, it’s not nearly as distracting as it sounds.

TechCrunch reports

Starting in January 2012, Facebook will gradually begin showing Sponsored Stories social ads in the main news feed of the web version of the site, a representative of the company tells us. Facebook hasn’t shown ads in the news feed since 2008, so this has big ramifications for advertisers and the user experience.

Google has retained its deal to be the default search engine in Mozilla’s Firefox browser which is used by over 400 million people. The deal comes after a three week period where the previous deal had expired and there was some concern (especially in Mozilla’s accounting office and board room) as to whether a new deal would be struck.

Well, Mozilla is more than happy to report on their blog

We’re pleased to announce that we have negotiated a significant and mutually beneficial revenue agreement with Google. This new agreement extends our long term search relationship with Google for at least three additional years.

“Under this multi-year agreement, Google Search will continue to be the default search provider for hundreds of millions of Firefox users around the world,” said Gary Kovacs, CEO, Mozilla.

If you’ve not yet seen this YouTube video of the FedEx delivery driver throwing a shopper’s new LCD monitor over a fence, then let’s get you up to speed.

Did your jaw drop? Mine did! You can read the back story here.

The question I have for you is, how should FedEx respond to this reputation damaging incident? I’ve listed a few ideas below, but leave a comment with your thoughts.

• Fly the poor guy out to FedEx headquarters–on a FedEx plane–to receive a personal apology from the CEO and receive a new LCD TV.
• An apology from the FedEx worker responsible, perhaps with an offer to come and personally set up the new monitor.