Marketing Pilgrim

Don’t go for second best baby

Put your blog to the test

You know, you know, you’ve got to

Make Blogger express how it feels

And maybe then you’ll know your blog is real!

I used to be a Blogger fan. However, just like my love of Madonna, I stopped liking Blogger when it started looking tired and old.

Well, Google has announced a new Blogger Template Designer, that might help breathe a little life into the service that arguable plays second-fiddle to WordPress.

With the new Blogger Template Designer you can–you guessed it–completely customize the look and feel of your blog–something my friend Vinny Lingham has being doing for years over at Yola.

Anyway, spam-scrapers bloggers can now enjoy these features:

• Fifteen new professional templates to start from (and more on their way)
• Custom blog layouts with one, two and three columns

As you know, a couple of weeks ago (my company) Trackur launched Trackur Free–a competely free version of the popular social media monitoring tool.

To celebrate Trackur Free’s success–and to get as many people protecting their reputation as possible–Trackur is now giving all users a chance to win a free Apple iPad!

Yep, you can get your hands on a free online reputation monitoring tool AND enter to win the hottest gadget around!

Want to enter? Head over to the Trackur site pronto!

Wouldn’t it make sense that if you spent more money on email marketing than pay-per-click marketing, you’d have a reasonable explanation for that choice?

Well, according to the data discovered in Econsultancy’s 2010 Email Marketing Census, companies are spending more on email marketing (17% of online budgets) than PPC (16%) despite not fully understanding the return on investment (ROI) achieved or taking advantage of one of the most important benefits of email marketing: segmentation.

When you run PPC campaign, you attempt to segment your target audience by using different ad creative and targeted landing pages. You wouldn’t bring a “window shopper” to a landing page that displayed only one product, would you? So it’s a shock that many companies are still not using segmentation to target their email campaigns and deliver messages, or offers, that are tailored to their customers’ known interests and buying habits. Think about that. When you email your existing customers, you already know at least a little about their buying preferences, so why would you not segment them so that they receive tailored email messages?

“You would have to be stupid. You would have to trip to not succeed at this at some point.”

Those words may come back to haunt the former Bebo chief Joanna Shields, now that rumors are circulating that the social network is about to be dropped like a hot potato.

Back when AOL bought Bebo for $850 million, I was already speculating that the social network had slipped from its valuation high of $1.5 billion. Now it appears that the social network has lost users–down from 22 million a month to 14.6 million–and with it, it’s value to AOL.

What’s interesting is the predicament facing AOL. Due to some complex tax laws, it may actually make better financial sense for AOL to just shut Bebo down.

Rome wasn’t built in a day.

A journey of a thousand miles, begins with a single step.

If you’re going through hell, keep going.

It’s always the darkest before the dawn.

Whatever the cliché being thrown around in Redmond, it must be working, because Bing’s US search share continues to nudge ever upwards.

According to comScore’s data, Bing climbed from 11.3% to 11.5%, likely stealing that share from the "we’ve given up on search" Yahoo, which dropped from 17% to 16.8%.

The only kink in Microsoft’s plan to catch Google? Google’s share increased too–up from 65.4% to 65.5%.

Lots of cool Twitter statistics coming out of Barracuda Networks new study (pdf).

Where do I start?

• 21% of Twitter users are actually using the service–meaning that have at least 10 followers, follow at least 10 people, and have tweeted at least 10 times.
• 74% of Twitter users have less than 10 followers! However, that number is improving with a 30% increase in the number of users with 10+ followers (since June 2009)
• 60% of Twitter users follow less than 10 people
• 34% of Twitter users have more followers than others they are following, showing an 70% increase from 20% in June 2009
• 73% of users have less than 10 tweets, as compared to 79% in June 2009.
• 49% of Twitter users joined between November 2008 and April 2009–the period when many celebrities jumped on the Twitter bandwagon

There’s good news for online retailers: Forrester is predicting a 10% growth rate for you guys!

In fact, online sales will increase from $173 billion this year to a healthy $249 billion in 2014. Along with that growth comes a nice bump in online retail’s share of all US retail sales: up from 6% to 8% share.

Forrester says our spending on clothing, consumer electronics and computers will lead the growth spurt.

Have you heard of the Streisand effect?

Long story short, in 2003 Barbra Streisand sued a photographer for $50 million because he took photos of her home. She said the photographs invaded her privacy. Unfortunately for her, the rest of the world had no clue of the existence of these photographs until after she filed the lawsuit. Filing the lawsuit created a greater issue than if she had just kept quiet.

Enter Lindsay Lohan.

The almost popular, but now notsomuch, actress is suing E-Trade for, get this, $100 million for naming one of its TV babies “Lindsay.” Apparently, Miss Lohan believes that she has obtained “single name” status–like Madonna or Oprah–and that everyone that sees the milkaholic manboy-stealer will instantly think of her–and that will ruin her stellar reputation.

Says Lohan’s lawyer: