Marketing Pilgrim

I am a FriendFeed fan boy.

That is saying a lot, because I am usually pretty critical of everything.

The platform is easy to use, and makes the first real concentrated effort towards making a single platform for all social media.

One of the main uses I see for FriendFeed is as a reputation monitoring and management tool.

Here are five ways to utilize the service for rep management and monitoring:

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The official Microsoft adCenter blog announced the beta testing of a desktop utility for their paid search platform.

For paid search managers, this software will function much like Google’s Adwords desktop application.

Basically you will be able to manage your adCenter campaigns from the convenience of your desktop without the use of a browser. The positives of software like this are numerous. The most obvious is that it allows you to make wholesale edits and revisions without worrying about the real time implications on your account. Such software also makes the initial process of paid search account setup much easier.

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This must have been a tough one for the search giant to figure out.

People read numbers better than they do colors.

Google has started to add Approximate word counts on their Adwords keyword tool, along side of their vague colored bar graphs, which used to be the only data they gave.

The reason behind these moves by the big G, or small g or whatever they are being called this week, is likely their realization that the future of paid search is in the small business. SMBs love freebies, and anything that can help them minimize how far they have to spread their marketing dollar.

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Vivisimo, an enterprise search company based in Pennsylvania, announced Thursday that it has expanded its search affiliate program, which offers a free search engine for all government Web sites.

This search platform indexes more than 50 million government documents.

The platform covers news, images, frequently asked questions, maps, and weather forecasts. Searchers can also find government contact information, applications, and notices regarding jobs and benefits. Managers of web sites related to the government can add new features to their sites and even ambiguous search terms will extract useful information, Vivisimo said.

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Today Google launched Google Trends for Websites.

This is the search giants first foray into competitive research, and comparisons are being drawn to Alexa and Quantacast.

Barry Schwartz points out a good use for the new tool at SearchEngineLand.com:

Now, if you think like a link builder - you can use this tool to find sites that are within your “neighborhood” or industry. So if I want to find link partners for the Search Engine Roundtable, I enter in seroundtable.com, look at the related sites and ask all of them for links. Then I go to all of those sites and see who is related to them. You can, theoretically, keep expanding that list, as far is it makes sense.

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Even if you don’t know who Michael D. Jensen is, chances are if you use Twitter you know of one of his apps.

For the last months Jensen has become one of the premier Twitter App developers, creating applications that utilize the Twitter API in fresh and creative ways.

According to Jensen it began with a Tweet from Lee Odden:

@mdjensen some of these tools remind me of what you made for MyBlogLog. Any chance you’ll get into the Twitter tools game?

And from there he has had the Twitter application development fever.

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A post at TechCrunch today boasts that Wikia is “beginning to suck a lot less.”

The wiki based search product is supposedly stepping up its game through the implementation of editing features that lets searchers reorder, add, remove, rate, annotate, and comment on results.

These new features make the system harder to gain, and spammers easier to oust.

Jimmy Wales admitted to the lack of quality his site has shown and stated that it:

Pretty much sucked. It has not been usable on a day to day basis.

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The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) recently set their “Interactive Campaign Setup Best Practices,” out on the world.

For those of you not familiar with the IAB, their site’s about page defines them as:

Founded in 1996, the Interactive Advertising Bureau represents over 375 leading interactive companies that actively engage in and support the sale of interactive advertising. IAB members are responsible for selling over 86% of online advertising in the United States. On behalf of its members, the IAB is dedicated to the continuing growth of the interactive advertising marketplace, of interactive’s share of total marketing spend, and of its members’ share of total marketing spend. The IAB evaluates and recommends standards and practices, fields interactive effectiveness research, and educates marketers, agencies, and media companies, as well as the wider business community, about the value of interactive advertising.

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The local search property, Citysearch.com, is coming under fire for its lack of a click fraud system.

According to a lawsuit filed yesterday in Los Angeles Superior Court, Citysearch.com is defrauding its advertising customers by not only turning a blind eye to click fraud, but the lawsuit states they are actually encouraging it.

“Most click fraud cases involve companies that simply turn a blind eye to it,” said the victims’ attorney, Brian S. Kabateck, Managing Partner of Kabateck Brown Kellner. “Citysearch does this too, since it has no real program to prevent click fraud. But Citysearch goes beyond indifference to actively incentivizing click fraud. Citysearch’s motive is simple: clicks equal cash, whether they’re fraudulent or not.”

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Pro sports organizations could use a few hours with a reputation management expert ala Andy Beal.

In the last few months, we have seen the sports world being devastated by its own lack of transparency. It is something we as marketers are learning to cope with now, but these multi-billion dollar leagues are still not catching on.

The online sports world continues to grow.

Blogs, forums, online gambling, and fantasy sports news and games abound.

Sites such as Deadspin.com rank amongst the most popular blogs on the Web, and they are almost completely supplied content by the fact that pro sports organizations and athletes do not understand the concept of transparency.

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A new Twitter application has been launched called StrawPoll, which offers Twitter users the ability to poll and monitor their followers.

The application can be found at www.StrawPollNow.com and is now available to all Twitter users.

StrawPoll works with the Twitter API to offer your followers not only the poll question you would like answered, but also a shortened URL to a StrawPollNow.com page where users can answer the poll more in-depth.

Followers can simply vote by replying to the person they follow with the number that represents the answer:

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The New York Times reported today that in an interview, Yahoo’s CEO and co-founder, Jerry Yang, claimed that Microsoft pulled its bid for his company after Yahoo counter offered the software giants previous bid.

This is in direct contrast to claims by Steve Ballmer and Microsoft’s advisers, that stated that the bid was pulled due to Yahoo’s unwillingness to counter, and Mr. Yang and his board’s decision to settle on a price of $37 a share their ultimate refusal to budge.

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