Marketing Pilgrim

Don’t forget to catch me at the SEO Meetup next Thursday, 7pm in Charlotte, NC.

For just $35 you’ll learn Online Reputation Management in Seven Steps, as well as get to network with Charlotte’s talented search marketers.

If you’re still on the fence about attending my one day Online Reputation Management Workshop in Raleigh (August 7th), the Charlotte event will give you a good taster.

Register here.

Paul Dunay has finished his Reputation Management for New Media Survey and you can now download the report–for free!

Finding useful stats on for online reputation management can be a chore, so I’m excited to get some insight into how companies are preparing, or not preparing.

Some highlights include:

• 53% of companies are making reputation monitoring a strategic priority in 2008.
• Yet, only 42% have any kind of online reputation plan in place, and
• 55% of those polled say they are not adequately prepared to handle a reputation crisis.

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Lots of Picks today, so let’s dive right in!

• Don’t get too excited when you see that Google Talk is now available for your iPhone. It’s browser-based, which means your conversation dies if you switch from Safari.
• In case you were wondering, Firefox did earn the world record for most downloads in a single day.
• Google signed an agreement with Brazil to fight child pornography on its social network Orkut–which, outside of Brazil, has to be Google’s biggest flop ever!
• If you enjoyed analyzing Twitter data, you’ll mourn the death of Twitterboard.

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Just yesterday, I had a conversation, agreeing that the only thing that could topple Google, would be privacy. The same day, a judge presiding over the Google/Viacom case issued a court order requiring Google to turn over your personal data.

The EFF reports the order requires Google to hand over YouTube’s Logging database. What’s in YouTube’s logging database?

…for each instance a video is watched, the unique “login ID” of the user who watched it, the time when the user started to watch the video, the internet protocol address other devices connected to the internet use to identify the user’s computer (“IP address”), and the identifier for the video.

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You have only until the end of day tomorrow to register for my Online Reputation Management Workshop and get the heavily discounted rate of just $797. After July 3rd, the rate goes up!

Whether you work for an online marketing/PR firm, or handle the branding for your employer, you’ll want to attend the workshop.

Heck, if you’re an SEO, you should attend if only to learn how to manage a client’s Google reputation. If you’re not offering Google reputation management services, you’re missing out!

I hope you’ll join me on August 7th, in Raleigh, NC!

Breaking news from Microsoft…

We’re excited to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Powerset, a San Francisco-based search and natural language company.

Powerset will join our core Search Relevance team, remaining intact in San Francisco. Powerset brings with it natural language technology that nicely complements other natural language processing technologies we have in Microsoft Research.

More importantly, Powerset brings to Live Search a set of talented engineers and computational linguists in downtown San Francisco. This is a great team with a wide range of experience from other search engines and research organizations like PARC (formerly Xerox PARC).

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Good morning Pilgrims!

I trust your day is going well. If not, maybe one of these hot news Picks will help–failing that, grab a donut!

• Silicon Alley Insider knows how Twitter can become a billion dollar company in one year; become a P2P mobile payment provider.
• Digg ’s Recommendation Engine is launching this week. Based upon what you’ve dugg before, Digg will recommend stories you may like.
• Speaking of Digg, it appears Netvibes would like a piece of your social-voting habit.
• Avinash Kaushik is a web analytics genius! He’s also pretty darn good at helping you measure the intersection of online and offline tracking too, as this excellent post demonstrates.

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While most of Radically Transparent is about managing and monitoring your online reputation, we spend a lot of time explaining that customers are discussing your brand and would love to have you join the conversation. New research from ExpoTV.com shows just how badly your customers want to hear from you.

Jeremiah Owyang has summarized the key points (emphasis is mine):

• 55% of customers in their survey want to have an ongoing discussion brands
• Respondents were most anxious to talk to the product design (49%) department, followed by customer support (14%), marketing (14%) and pricing (13%)

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As an internet marketer, any report of an increase in online ad spending brings a smile to my face. And a new forecast by ZenithOptimedia is the latest reason for happiness.

Zenith’s original forecast, made in March, said the Internet would account for 9.7 percent of global ad spending this year, for a total of $47.5 billion, and 12.3 percent in 2010, or $66.9 billion.

In the new forecast, Zenith predicts that online spending will exceed 10 percent of all advertising in 2008, for a total of $52.2 billion, and in 2010 account for 13.6 percent, or $78.2 billion.

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For years, I’ve been able to convince web designers not to design using Adobe Flash. I personally believe that web sites built entirely in Flash make for a poor user experience, but I’ve been able to play the "Google can’t index Flash" card as a cover-up for my dislike of Flash. "Don’t avoid Flash because I say so, avoid Flash because your web site will be invisible to Google."

It worked like a charm. That is, until now. Google just ruined the web.

Thanks to Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library, Google has announced a new indexing algorithm that is able to crawl and index the content of Flash files.

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The 3rd Annual SEM Scholarship Contest has now finished and we’re working on compiling the results to determine our five finalists.

Unlike previous years, we’ve decided to keep the five finalists–and traffic numbers– a secret during judging (we will reveal once the winner is announced), so that our panel of expert judges can deliberate without fear of influence.

Lastly, as the Fourth of July holiday is fast approaching, we’re delaying announcing the winner until July 11th.  I know this will likely cause hair-loss for some of you, but this delay will ensure our judges have plenty of time to make their decision.

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Just six weeks after its coming out parade, natural language search engine Powerset is the subject of two rumors about its acquisition by Microsoft.

VentureBeat kicks things off, by telling us the deal has been done, and the purchase price $100 million.

Microsoft, the software giant flush with billions of dollars in its warchest, has agreed to buy Silicon Valley semantic search engine Powerset, we’ve learned.

The purchase price is rumored to be slightly more than $100 million. An announcement is expected next month.

As if annoyed that VentureBeat might have gotten the scoop, TechCrunch reports the deal is not actually final.

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