Marketing Pilgrim

Well, looks like Twitter has arrived for real. Companies are considering the service for their marketing and customer efforts. There still appears to be significant hype around every time someone at Twitter has gas. Twitter is looking to protect its trademark and is looking to trademark other sounds from nature like chirps and peeps. So what’s next? Well, since it is the Internet what would talking about Twitter be without now mentioning porn and spam?

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has said recently that the service will be a success when people stop talking about it and just accept it as a utility. With MediaPost talking about the proliferation of porn and spam that chatter isn’t likely to end anytime soon. That is, of course, unless Twitter does something about it.

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Last week, we saw that Facebook was taking status updates public for selected test users (a la Twitter). Those selected users were ones that had already set their profiles to a high level of sharing—everyone could see their profiles already.

Now Facebook will make it so that all users will have a very granular control over exactly what gets shared with whom.

These settings can be applied on a message-by-message basis, but there will also be changes to the full privacy settings for every member. As paidContent points out this will eliminate the need to view at least six pages of privacy settings.

And now Facebook announces that they’ll be rolling out this change to the full site very shortly:

To make it easy for users to set their profiles’ level of “openness,” Facebook will be using a transition tool. Here’s the first step:

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Looks like Twitter is not looking the other way as much these days. TechCrunch reports that there is some concern at the social networking company that developers are using the term ‘Tweet’ too much. Twitter, in fact, is claiming that the use of that trademark in the naming of any third party app is something they are ‘uncomfortable’ with. Here is an e-mail that was passed along to the TechCrunch folks relating to the subject.

Hi,

Twitter, Inc is uncomfortable with the use of the word Tweet (our trademark) and the similarity in your UI and our own. How can we go about having you change your UI to better differentiate your offering from our own?

Thanks,

The original reason for the e-mail was apparently around a developers attempt to have a UI so similar to Twitter’s that it may have been confused for the real deal. In the hashing out of that information the above e-mail was sent and the questions are starting to flow.

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VentureBeat reports that Flickr is finally enabling its users to tweet their photos on the service.

What took them so long? Flickr now has a built-in feature that lets members tweet their photos. “You can upload directly to Flickr and Twitter simultaneously, or tweet a photo already on Flickr, using a special short Flic.kr URL,” says the company’s FAQ. It also explains how to post photos from your phone, and how to tweet from Flickr.

Flickr spelled out the “how to’s” in the following from their PR firm

To use Flickr 2 Twitter, members need to first authorize Flickr to post to their Twitter accounts. Once authorized, members will be able to tweet photos from the “Blog This” button on their photo page or from their mobile devices.

Mobile uploading is possible once members enable their Upload by Email settings (unique Flickr email upload address + “2twitter”). After you’ve successfully tweeted your Flickr photo, it will look something like this.

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Facebook now has someone to watch the cash register as they roll toward setting revenue records for the company. After a several months long search, Facebook has found their man according to cnet

Facebook has named former Genentech executive David Ebersman to the office of chief financial officer. He replaces Gideon Yu, whose departure was announced at the end of March.

“We received a lot of interest in the CFO position and had the opportunity to meet with many impressive candidates,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “We quickly recognized that David was the right person for Facebook. He was Genentech’s CFO while revenue tripled, and his success in scaling the finance organization of a fast growing company will be important to Facebook.”

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I am not an author. I’m a blogger. If I say something that someone disagrees with they can let me have it in the comments section of the blog. At that point, the decision needs to be made how, or even better if, I should fire back. In most cases, I make the decision to let bygones be bygones because comment crossfire usually ends badly (or at the very least awkwardly) and it doesn’t accomplish much in the end. As long as there are no off color comments regarding direct family members or my heritage, I can take it. Most online attacks come from people who are only exercising their Internet muscles anyway (meaning since they never actually have to face someone in person they can look like they have some nerve).

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If nothing else, Twitter sure generates a lot of user data. As to the accuracy of the data there is no way to tell what’s what. When the data comes from Twitter directly, however, do you trust it more or less?

As reported in the Guardian, Evan Weaver, the lead engineer on the Twitter services team gave a little insight into the inner workings of the service but also told the audience at the QCon 2009 some tidbits like

• The average Twitter user has 126 followers (no mention as to how many are spam)

• Only 20% of the Twitter traffic comes through the website. Third party software on smart phones and computers contribute the rest.

• While the Iranian election has seen some traffic spikes it pales in comparison to the Obama inauguration, which had about 300 tweets per second (and that was at a time where there was considerably fewer users and the real hype around the service had yet to reach its peak)

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As a marketer, which of these would you find more useful?

Tweet: @sumbuddy dont buy the BrandCo table it sux–hasnt stood up at all

or

On site review: (2 stars) For what we paid for this table, my husband and I expected something more durable. The wood dents way too easily for a kids’ table. We expected a lot more from BrandCo.

While both product reviews are negative, the on-site review giving a client’s product two stars might make us cringe a bit more than a single Tweet (even if the Tweet was as specific as the other review). But the on-site review might also be the better marketing tool, at least according to Ad Age today.

Ad Age contends that product reviews are more useful to companies and marketers than the oft-touted media sweethearts of social media: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube (the triumvirate of YouTwitFace), and the like.

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Man, hardly a week goes by without the European Union getting after some Internet behemoth for bad business practices or invading individuals’ privacy, or both. Usually it’s Google on the receiving end, but this time it’s social networks that are getting scrutiny from the supranational regulator.

As Facebook begins testing greater and greater publicity, with user controls, the EU begins demanding more and more of social networks’ privacy policies—or, that’s what we think their vague regulations are trying to do, anyway.

There are several specific policies that social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, which both have large European audiences, will have to comply with: automatically setting users’ privacy to the highest level (giving users the option to opt out of that extreme level of privacy), allow users to limit the data shared with third-parties (including advertisers and applications), and limit the use of “sensitive information,” including race, religion and political views, in behavioral targeting.

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This week, Facebook announced some coming changes to your status updates. Soon, just like with Twitter, you’ll have the option to make them public—but not just to everyone on the world’s most popular social network, but everyone around the world. (You know, with Internet access.)

Because this feature is being implemented on the Facebook Publisher, you can add more to your newsstream than just text updates and links. The buttons below the text area allow you to add photos, videos and announcements or other integrations from your apps that have integrated with the publisher.

Facebook also gave an in-depth explanation of each level of access:

• Everyone: Anyone, on or off, of Facebook can see it.
• Friends and Networks: People you have confirmed as friends and people in any school or work networks that you’ve joined can see it.

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It appears that some folks are starting to slow down on the Twype (Twitter hype, of course) and looking at the bigger picture impact that the service is making. Whether Twitter survives and / or thrives is not the point really. It’s a very real possibility that the folks at Twitter may have set the table for other niche players to come in and take advantage of the trend that Twitter has really accelerated; which is real time information retrieval.

One person who has had significant success in making real time information work is Marc Benioff, co-founder and chief executive of Salesforce.com. Here’s a guy that can sure spot a need (not just a fad or a trend but a real need) and build a solution that meets the need head on. He helped bring the SaaS (software as a service) CRM and sales force automation business to the forefront of business applications and has been the industry leader ever since.

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It has been written that there is nothing new under the sun. Sometimes it feels that way when the talk turns to social media and its impact on marketing as a whole and, more specifically, any Internet marketing efforts. Of course, every bit of marketing is going to be affected by a medium that encourages / celebrates shared information and the ability to color outside the lines. What’s not to like about a communication vehicle that allows the consumer to make decisions based on just about everything other than what is company generated propaganda?

Mediapost has picked up on a study conducted by StrongMail that examines the developing relationship between e-mail marketing and social media. Once again, when you read this kind of thing you probably say “Well, no kidding, duh.” But sometimes it’s good to see some numbers around the accepted theory.

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