Marketing Pilgrim

If fear, scandal, sex, and humor sell newspapers, it stands to reason that those topics would make for the most popular articles on news sites and blogs. Right?

Wrong!

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have intensively studied the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles and discovered that it was an entirely unexpected emotion that caused the average reader to share an article.

When Google announced that it would no longer play nicely with China, some suggested that this was a just a ploy to pull out of a country that it was struggling to dominate.

Of course, Google’s official stance was that it was just too much of a compromise to operate any business in China:

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

There were lots of entertaining Super Bowl ads this year, but as an internet marketer, two interested me the most: Google’s first ever TV ad, and the new upstart, KGB.

Forget the fact that Google–the ambassador for new, measurable ads–ran an old-school TV ad, which do you think was the best of the two?

We finally have a Marketing Pilgrim fan page on Facebook!

I know, I know, it’s about time! But hear me out.

You see, I always figured that having a fan page on Facebook wouldn’t be of interest to Marketing Pilgrims. I thought a fan page was just an ugly expression of vanity–did I really feel like people loved this site enough to become a "fan" of it?

Then it struck me.

It’s not about being a fan, it’s about providing you with another way to enjoy Marketing Pilgrim’s posts. Maybe you’re not a big user of RSS, but would prefer to nom on our delicious posts, while throwing sheep or growing carrots.

Online reputation management isn’t always about big corporate brands. In fact, half of my book Radically Transparent is dedicated to building and managing personal reputations.

Just in case you’re not convinced that you need to worry about your personal reputation online, you might want to check out the interview I did with WCCO Radio:

Listen to the Radio Interview

In it I discuss three important themes:

1. How your social networking profiles can hurt your career and job hunting.
2. How debt collectors are tracking people down via social networks.
3. How scammers and thieves are praying on the naive.

I just noticed that my number of tweets just skyrocketed, according to Twitter.

Apparently, I tweeted 34,000 tweets overnight!

Here’s Google’s cache from last night:

And here’s what’s showing right now:

I’m not the only one to see this. My wife’s just jumped around 10,000 too.

Anyone else seeing this?

UPDATE: While this is annoying–I don’t want to appear as though I’m a tweeting windbag–it’s a known, low-priority bug, according to Twitter.

If you’re a government conspiracy theorist, you probably shouldn’t read this post. You won’t sleep for weeks.

The National Security Agency is rumored to be working with Google in light of the cyber attacks that reportedly came from China.

Think about that for a second. Big Brother just partnered with big brother, to try and fight off communist China.

Doesn’t that make you just feel so warm and fuzzy?

No one is publicly admitted that the NSA and Google are collaborating, but the source of the story isn’t some blogger looking for publicity, it’s The Washington Post–so there must be some smoke surrounding this alleged fire.

According to a new study by Econsultancy and ExactTarget, marketers face a conundrum when it comes to increasing their online marketing budgets in 2010.

They want to do it, but 40% of those surveyed simply don’t have the budget to spend more on marketing this year.

What to do; what to do?

I know, let us reduce our spending on print ads (41%), radio (36%), and TV (31%):

And channel those funds into Facebook and Twitter (70%), blogging (64%), and SEO (64%):