Marketing Pilgrim

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.

TweetBeep – Launched May 6, 2008

TweetBeep is allows you to receive alerts when various key terms you enter are mentioned on Twitter. You can receive an email when someone is twittering about you, your company, your product, or your website. This is obviously a great reputation management tool, especially as Twitter grows in relevance among the everyday social media user.

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.

The thing that really strikes me about Wikia.com is that the top result for every search is a Wikipedia entry. As search marketers know the first listing garners over 40% of the overall search traffic for a term. Doesn’t this make Wikia.com feel like a Wikipedia search engine, more than a wiki based search engine?

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.

Their about page goes on to state their six core objectives as being:

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.”

You may remember Kabateck from other paid search cases, including winning a multi-million dollar settlement from Yahoo! and playing a part in a $90 million settlement from Google on behalf of advertisers who were victimized by click fraud.

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.

Its not what you say.

Example being Curt Schilling, a media lightning rod and pitcher for the Boston Red Sox that has his own blog and lets the world know his controversial thought process.

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:

Are you currently reading a book: Yes (1) or No (2) ?

@dsnyder <1>

Or you can also add a reply:

Are you currently reading a book: Yes (1) or No (2) ?

@dsnyder <1><I am reading Andy Beal’s Radically Transparent>

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.

“They chose to walk away after we put a price on the table, and they didn’t want to negotiate,” Mr. Yang said. “From my perspective, we were open all along to selling to Microsoft. We just feel Yahoo, either stand-alone or with Microsoft, is worth more than what they put on the table.”

Techcrunch.com has released an email sent by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to Microsoft employees:

This afternoon I sent the attached letter to Jerry Yang announcing that Microsoft has withdrawn its proposal to acquire Yahoo. We proposed the deal in the belief that a Microsoft-Yahoo merger would create a combined company with the resources and assets to win in the fast-growing market for advertising and online services.

Ballmer spends most the email bolstering the company’s initiatives in terms of Internet advertising, and explains that the Yahoo merger was more of an accelerated means to obtain the company’s vision on the Web rather than an end all be all.

Although the acquisition of Yahoo would have accelerated our ability to deliver on our strategy in advertising and online services, I remain confident that we can achieve our goals without Yahoo. We have a strategy in place to do so and we will continue to expand on this strategy and accelerate our progress.