Marketing Pilgrim

How would you like to launch a social network and instantly amass more than 150 million monthly users?

Well, Google just launched Google Buzz and it’s going to be tied into its existing Gmail user base–all 150+ million of them!

How smart is that?

Google has failed to gain traction with any of its previous social networking efforts. How many of you are active Orkut or Google Wave users? So, instead of trying to build a new social network from scratch–and likely failing–it’s tying Google Buzz directly into its email offering.

Genius!

UPDATE: Google Buzz is now live!

The buzz around the Internet marketing and social media circles is humming with the news (or the rumor, call it what you want) that Google is getting set to introduce a new feature to Gmail. No, it has nothing to do with your e-mail but rather your ‘experience’ with Gmail and in particular your social experience. Looks like Google is getting into the social game.  This comes on the heels of the talk of Facebook getting into the e-mail game as well. What’s going on? It’s like opposite day with Google going social and Facebook getting all e-mail on us.

Everyone in the world of marketing whether you are online or offline (or hopefully the right combination of the two) wants to better define social media and its uses. Different sectors or verticals see how the various social media tools impact their particular type of business and no two seem to act alike. Much of that has to do with having too little real data to draw firm conclusions from and the learning curve that is occurring on the customer side of this equation.

Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer survey shows that traditional media is trending downward among “informed publics aged 25-64 in 20 countries”—and so is their trust in “a person like yourself” (although much less dramatically).

The executive summary shows traditional media trust is diving, with TV news down 20%, radio news down 17% and print news down 12%. However, digital media isn’t exactly making up the gap—radio and TV news coverage still slightly beat out online search engines (38%, 36% and 35%, respectively), and newspaper articles close behind (34%). Corporate communications (press releases, I guess) were also in the same tier—significantly ahead of social networking sites (19%), which only barely edged out product advertising (17%).

Last week, Facebook posted instructions on how to make FB your “personalized news channel” and minimize nonnewsworthy clutter on their blog. Inspired, Hitwise looked at the numbers, and it looks like Facebook is already well on its way as a news starting point.

Hitwise’s stats show that Facebook is well ahead of some other news aggregators in terms of sending downstream traffic to news websites:

After Google (17.32%), Yahoo (7.89%) and msn (4.43%), Facebook was the fourth most popular referrer for news websites. Says Hitwise:

Two years ago, Microsoft purchased a 1.6% stake in Facebook for $240M—and with the agreement that Bing would be providing web search on the world’s most popular social network. That deal is now expanding, according to the Bing blog—to not only take in an expanded, enhanced search but also more countries around the world. Most importantly, however, Bing is giving up its claim on selling Facebook advertising.

Online reputation management isn’t always about big corporate brands. In fact, half of my book Radically Transparent is dedicated to building and managing personal reputations.

Just in case you’re not convinced that you need to worry about your personal reputation online, you might want to check out the interview I did with WCCO Radio:

Listen to the Radio Interview

In it I discuss three important themes:

1. How your social networking profiles can hurt your career and job hunting.
2. How debt collectors are tracking people down via social networks.
3. How scammers and thieves are praying on the naive.

Facebook has begun introducing a new home page redesign to about 20% of the total 400 million ‘users’ of the social media platform. It appears as if the gist of the changes are just moving certain elements to different parts of the page so they can get more attention from users. More usage of the functionality means more stickiness means more opportunities to make cash. It’s that simple. Inside Facebook tells us