Marketing Pilgrim

Google has shown an affinity for Wikipedia for years, often listing entries as a top source for many types of web searches. Now they’ve added links to Wikipedia pages with news stories on Google News.  This seems like a small detail, but it gives Wikipedia even more credibility with the most popular search engine.

Google News already gets news from both traditional media like major newspapers, CNN and Reuters (though the AP hates this fact), as well as new media (popular news blogs like Marketing Pilgrim).  There are also links to YouTube videos. This further blends how we get news and what is credible.

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Last year PRLeap added social features to their press releases. Last week they added a new feature called PRTube. It’s like YouTube for press releases. You can embed a viewer to display PRLeap press release on your blog, web site, etc. This is a great addition. I only wish you could resize the viewer – it’s a little big. To embed any press release, click on it and on the right hand side you can get the code.

As I wrote I like PRLeap and with that feature I’d prefer to use them over a comparable service that doesn’t offer a viewer. Several sites have added a viewer that shows a web site under the press release but none that embed the actual press release on your site. No one likes to read press releases (or at least I don’t think they do). But this means no extra clicks and you can skim it right on site.

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It’s been a year since Southwest Airlines announced they were going to test in air Internet service. Now it’s really happening. The satellite broadband will be tested on one plane first. Then they plan to expand to at least three more planes by March.

The test will run for 60 days. They will gauge demand and see how the service works before determining if and how much they’ll charge.

Southwest has already contracted with Yahoo as a partner. Yahoo will provide a home page for the airline that will include information about the flight and destination.

For long flights this will practically guarantee that I fly Southwest. My only question is, what about plugs or battery supply? As far as I know there’s no place to recharge.

Southwest has been getting a lot of milage out of the announcement on Twitter.

Econsultancy recently ranted about the one-dimensional marketing world many top brands like Coke operate in. Coke may have the worlds biggest Facebook Fan Page but they’re not on Twitter!! And they aren’t integrating their online and offline ad campaigns either.

“All too often the internet (and mobile) is a last-minute thought, when it should be built into a campaign at the outset. More than that, it should now be hardwired into marketing strategies by default.”

-Why do Top Global Brands Like Coca Cola Ignor Twitter?

Not only has someone else claimed Coke’s brand names on Twitter Coke doesn’t appear to listen. Even though it’s being talked about.  The word ‘Coke’ appears more than 1,000 times on Twitter in just a day (their other brands are mentioned too).

Here are ideas on how to engage people using Twitter that you can steal for your cutting edge marketing plan:

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Facebook’s popular “25 Things About Me” meme  has gone viral and has even hit mainstream media (it’s in Time Magazine!). And since you have to have a Facebook account to participate, this simple request has driven a lot of new signups and traffic to the site.

Here’s how it works: you write 25 facts about yourself, post it on Facebook, and tag your Facebook friends so they could fill out 25 random things about themselves. Have you done it yet? If you don’t know how to tag someone, you learn.

It ended up being big – as in about 5 million of these have been written in just one week big. As a result we know far more about the minutia of each other’s lives than we ever did. I’ve known my cousin since we were born and I learned new trivia about her from this meme.

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The co-founder of Twitter Biz Stone has confirmed that Twitter plans to charge businesses for extra services. There are few details or dates. But that’s the question in all of our minds—especially the investors who put $20 million into Twitter and I assume want to see a return.

No doubt Twitter has proven its value—TechCrunch wrote that Dell made a million over the holidays by using Twitter to tell people about discounts and sales.

There are said to be anywhere from 4 million to 6 million people using Twitter (LinkedIn.com is said to have over 20 million users and turn a profit). The problem with monetizing social networks is that people don’t go there to buy, but to communicate. Plus, they’re used to getting everything free. Even Dell’s VP was quoted as saying that Twitter better keep it simple and inexpensive if they do plan to charge.

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Newspapers and traditional media are bleeding profits and jobs. It’s one of the hardest hit sectors, so it’s not as if they couldn’t see this coming. But News Corp’s CEO Rupert Murdoch says it’s even worse than he thought. The company just announced they are writing off $8.4 billion of losses.

News Corp. is the largest media conglomerate in the world. They own MySpace, Hulu, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, Photobucket, HarperCollins, and on and on. The company doesn’t break up revenues and losses by companies but did say MySpace ad revenues haven’t grown – profits are flat. In this climate you can take that as good news.

Being the optimist that I am I have to mention some more more good news. The LA Times recently reported that their online ad revenue is now paying for their entire editorial payroll for both print and online versions.

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For all of you lucky iPhone owners, there’s a new source to get books and magazines (like Vegetarian Times), for free on your mobile phone. Google Book Search has gone mobile.  The service is also on phones built on Google’s Android platform.

I’m the kind of person who likes to read – especially in an airport – and this gives free access to over a million books. Most of the books are in the public domain – which means published before 1923.

Amazon, maker of the Kindle also announced this week that they’re making their ebooks available on cell phones. To me, that’s even better. They have far less titles, and you’ve got to pay for them, but they’re current. Plus you get all the books are in their entirety.

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I’m in an awards mood today, and it’s almost time to reflect on 2008 as we head barreling into 2009. The New York Times blogged about a company’s quest (great PR move by Sawhorse Media)  to find the best tweeters of the year. The awards are called the Shorty Awards, and it’s a hot topic on Twitter. Over 12,000 entries have come in already.

I thought it was for top tweets, but it’s really for the top people on Twitter in different categories. This means it serves as a great way to see who’s popular on different subjects (just in case you need to reach or follow one of them).

To me the most impactful tweet of this year came from James Karl Buck.  He used his cell phone to tweet one impactful word from an Egyptian jail: arrested. Then another message: Free. I don’t know if they found him since then though.

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100 Top Online Marketers of 2008

Invesp Consulting, a company that does landing page optimization asked online marketers to nominate the best online marketers of 2008. These are marketers who have been innovative and contributed to online marketing as a whole. They named 100 of the best.

The first pick for online marketer of the Year was Chris Hughes who ran the online side of the historic victory of president elect Barak Obama and co-founded Facebook. “The campaign relied heavily on social media outlets to reach out to potential voters, increase their knowledge of Mr. Obama and rally their votes.” Hughes is also the youngest person on the list.

Hughes ran the online campaign that got 1.5 million volunteers registered on myBarackObama.com and gathered $600 million in contributions online. He also built a database of 3 million mobile phone numbers. To do that they promised supporters that they would be notified of campaign news before the media (steal this concept!).

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Have you ever accidentally deleted a blog? I haven’t, but Wordpress deleted mine for having one spammy link when I was a new blogger and didn’t know better. I never got it back.

Google accidentally deleted their own blog once. This is preventable. Blogged.com blog backup service is celebrating the end of their beta launch with the  “Be a Hero. Save a blog.” contest.

They will offer more blog services but for now you can get a free blog backup (for a limited time). All day today Dec. 15, 2008 they are running a contest. Every two hours they’re giving away either a 16GB iPod Touch, or a Cricut Personal Electronic Cutter Machine.

To enter, do one of the items below. If you do more you get entered more times into the drawing…but you have to enter today. Here’s how:

1. Join Bloggled. Register and sign up for a Bloggled account.

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Want to know what we as a group think about, worry about, and are curious about? Ask.com gives insight by naming the top searches of the year. 2008 was a year of worries about gas prices and the economy. We sought out deals on vacations, used cars, and cheap apartments.

Ask.com, the 7th largest search engine in the US gets 70 million unique monthly searches, according to comScore Media Metrix (Oct. 2008). Last year we had different things on our minds, and the categories of queries has changed. Still, the #1 search last year for politicians during the primaries is now president elect Barack Obama.

The famous celebrity moms who captured our attention was a pregnant Angelina Jolie, Jessica Alba, a young and pregnant Jamie Lynn Spears, and a perky politician most of us hadn’t heard of until this year: Sarah Palin.

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