Marketing Pilgrim

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So, in the late, late nights that I’ve spent making sense of and organizing Social Media Marketing, I’ve been able to find nothing that outlines strategies or fundamentals of Social Media Marketing. Yes, Rohit Bhargava created a post that kicked into gear the “5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO).” After 20 days and much buzz in the blogosphere, it was expanded into 17 rules, with additions from all over the online marketing and business community’s thought leaders. And yet, while it’s an absolute must-read, there’s still no strategy outlining the fundamental strategies or tactics of Social Media Marketing.

That’s what I’ve racked my brain to figure out and this is what I define as the Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing.

The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing

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This was once just a parody, but you can now get your hands on the real 7-Minute SEO Guide!

And this is how the meeting went:

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From the Search Engine Watch Blog:

“At Search Engine Watch Live in Seattle last week, Lexa Pope from the Google AdWords team discussed their new ad scheduling features that will be released in a few weeks. The new features will allow advertisers to schedule the ads to show on weekends or weekdays only, or on other set days the advertiser specifies. Dayparting is also included allowing advertisers to schedule their ads during specific hours, such as to run late at night or at lunchtime only.”

I know quite a few people that will be stoked to have this new functionality given to advertisers:

“Ad scheduling allows advertisers to run their ads and modify their bids based on time of day as well as intra-day and intra-week cycles in campaign performance.”

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New Nielsen/NetRatings stats show Google with a 50% market share, with Yahoo! holding steady at 22%, and MSN dropping from 12-11% compared with a year prior.

These are the same trends that were noted in Monday’s comScore report, but with slightly different percentages.

Computerworld speculates that Microsoft and Yahoo! may be teaming up to compete against Google in the search space.

Citing Microsoft employee Ian McAllister’s recent blog post, it certainly appears that Yahoo! could be an unnamed potential partner as MS and Yahoo! look to slow Google’s rapid expansion and rising market share. ComputerWorld also suggests that the partner, instead of Yahoo!, may be a major Internet Service Provider as the post notes.

I’ll copy Ian’s blog post, as it doesn’t appear to be something that would likely stick around for too long.

“Whoa! A Major Player Looks To Take Google Down A Peg

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In a great example of how to leverage blog marketing, the New York Times reports on Amazon Connect which “allows authors to post messages directly to their readers on a wide variety of subjects…”

“…begun late last month to enhance the connections between authors and their fans – and to sell more books – with author blogs and extended personal profile pages on the company’s online bookstore site. So far, Amazon has recruited a group of about a dozen authors, including novelists, writers of child care manuals and experts on subjects as diverse as real estate investing, science, fishing and the lyrics of the Grateful Dead.”

Microsoft, Google, and Kai-Fu Lee have reached a settlement that all parties have agreed upon.

For those that may not know…

“Lee had worked at Microsoft since 2000 and helped develop its MSN Internet search technology, including desktop search software rivaling Google’s. Lee joined Google in July to lead the search engine’s expansion into China…”

Must be nice having two of the largest and most competitive companies in the world fighting over you.

Red Herring provides a great outline of Yahoo!’s attempt to gain publisher advertising market share from Google’s AdSense service with its Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN).

On a sidenote to this, I have heard direct reports from other publishers that YPN is providing a solid 200% revenue comparison, in some markets, compared to Google’s AdSense. Which, if this is accurate, is one sure-fire way to take market share pretty significantly away from Google, though at an obviously greater expense.

It’s nice to see competition for the independent (and maybe not-so-independent) publishers out there.

Thanks Cindy!

Gary Price has a phenomenal overview of Topix.net’s achievements this year. I’m not even going to try and summarize it, as you should just go straight there to read it, but here are some bullet points.

• Acquisition of 75% of the company from three different news sources
• Announcing a deal with the New York Times
• Increased from 300,000 to 360,000 categories/channels
• Offering RSS feeds for each category/channel
• The addition of over 15,000 blogs

The list just goes on and on and on…

TheStreet.com reports that Ask Jeeves is preparing to increase staff by 20%, “expanding both its operations center and its corporate headquarters staff in order to compete more publicly with it’s larger colleagues in the search space.

“What we really want to do is grow share,” says Berkowitz, who has headed Ask Jeeves since 2001, in an interview. “A lot of stuff is going to be happening” next year.

As Wikipedia becomes larger and more widely accepted, now with an Alexa rank in the range of the top 30 websites on the Internet, it’s beginning to have an impact on people’s perception, accuracy, and donations strategies. All of which have been, for the most part, positive.

A recent study by Nature Magazine, shows that Wikipedia is actually fairly close in accuracy to the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

A ZDNet blog post states that “The study found both had an equal number of what were called “serious errors,” while Wikipedia had somewhat more modest errors.”

Additionally, it seems that Wikipedia has recently begun a donations effort in order to continue operations as a free resource, and aims to be the PBS of the Web.

There have been arguments that all they would need to do would be to insert some contextual advertising (AdSense, YPN), but I think that defeats the purpose of being a more purist non-profit organization, steering away from helping another company profit from its business.

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A shopping comparison engine purchased by a credit checking company?

However, what does make sense, is that Experian is owned by GUS Plc, “Britain’s second-largest retailer by market value”. Yet, the press release states that the acquisition will fall under Experian because it “complements Experian’s existing operations, connecting consumers to companies over the Internet.”

At first, I was thinking to myself, “Now, I might be missing something here, but, wouldn’t it be more beneficial to have PriceGrabber operate under GUS’s Argos Retail Group?”

Then, nearing the end of the official press release is where it begins to come together as far as their plans.

“Retail and catalogue shopping is the second largest vertical market for Experian Globally.”

With PriceGrabber.com’s 2005 estimated sales of $60 million, and $25 million EBIT, it clearly becomes obvious that this acquisition is part of their strategy to acquire more customers for Experian, and not solely because of the future value they see in the shopping comparison vertical.

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