Senin, 17 Januari 2011

Marketing Pilgrim Published: “Apple Gets In Front of Jobs Health Leave News” plus 3 more

Marketing Pilgrim Published: “Apple Gets In Front of Jobs Health Leave News” plus 3 more

Link to Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

Apple Gets In Front of Jobs Health Leave News

Posted: 17 Jan 2011 07:09 AM PST

In the past, Apple has been pretty secretive about the health issues of its leader, Steve Jobs.

Today, Apple decided to make an internal memo public on their site. In this day and age of making sure you control your online message, it's the best policy. Of course, this won't stop the wild speculation. Here's the announcement at the Apple site.

As for us here at Marketing Pilgrim, rather than speculate, we're just going to give our best wishes and our prayers for things to go well for Mr. Jobs, whatever the health concerns may be.

Facebook Looks to Give Your Mobile Number and Address to Developers

Posted: 17 Jan 2011 06:05 AM PST

Ahh, Facebook. You've just helped Sony Pictures win a bunch of Golden Globes for their sensational betrayal portrayal of the start of Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg. The lasting impression of the movie comes from a line by Zuck's then girlfriend, Erica Albright (hat tip to TechCrunch)

You are probably going to be a very successful computer person. But you're going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole.

Memories. Good times.

Well, fast forward many years later and the world is dealing with actions like the latest one from Facebook that might verify Ms. Albright's assessment. All Facebook reports about the latest development for developers that can make your mobile number and address part of the data you hand over (and most will because they don't pay attention!)

Facebook has put in a lot of effort to getting users to enter their mobile numbers. But now the social network is giving developers access to numbers in addition to home addresses with a single click. Is this just trouble waiting to happen?

The timing of the post couldn't have been more questionable — just as most people were leaving work on the west coast and Facebook employees were beginning their weekly happy hour at Cafe 6. Granted, the company's job is to make this post appear as though it's just another day at the social network, in an effort to play down the significance of this new functionality. Over the weekend a number of publications began discussing the issue, the most sensational of which comes from Sophos, which writes "Rogue Facebook apps can now access your home address and mobile phone number."

The Facebook Developer's blog post occurred in that classic late Friday slot that everyone uses to bury the news they really don't want anyone to know but can point to later and say "We told you that!".

User Address and Mobile Phone Number
We are now making a user's address and mobile phone number accessible as part of the User Graph object. Because this is sensitive information, we have created the new user_address anduser_mobile_phone permissions. These permissions must be explicitly granted to your application by the user via our standard permissions dialogs.

The box that users will see will look like this.

Of course, Facebook and developers alike are banking on the Pavlovian response of most of Facebook's great unwashed (those who are clueless about how Facebook plays loose with their privacy) to push the blue button without really paying attention to what they are doing. That's a nice touch. Deviant but nice.

So when does this kind of stuff become disturbing enough for people to turn away from Facebook? Are we so far down this path that there may not another competitor to come along and do something that is a compromise between what advertisers need and what is prudent for users?

Is it the scale that Facebook has achieved that forces them to do this kind of thing and make it look like some back alley deal? Are there such great pressures to live up the valuation that now we will see greater and greater moves toward totally disregarding online privacy and safety?

So many questions and so few answers. Maybe I'll put a poll up on Facebook!

Will Groupon CEO Video Apology For Deal Gone Wrong Be A Regular Deal?

Posted: 17 Jan 2011 05:34 AM PST

The "Can't do anything wrong these days" company is Groupon. With the talk of a $15 billion IPO in the offing and the fact that they have been handed the crown of the "Next Big Thing" (or "Greatest Indicator of a new Bubble" depending on who you listen to) the video below from CEO and co-founder Andrew Mason can give some insight into what many feel is happening with Groupon deals more often than we know.

The background is that a 'Groupon' went pretty poorly in Japan and Groupon is trying to silence the storm in Japan and get everyone back to ‘Groupon normal’. Right now it’s not. Here's Mason's apology.

To his credit this is the right thing to do. The trouble is that most of the world will now be looking for similar apologies for "Groupons Gone Bad" (it's like Girls Gone Wild but even lamer if you can believe that). The reports about Groupon's success are all over the place while reports of bad Groupons (don't you just want to roll up a newspaper and whack it on the nose and yell "Bad Groupon!") get swept away as anomalies. Groupon knows that its fate rests in the hands of SMB's and more delivering on promises that maybe they can't keep.

To fight that TechCrunch reports

Groupon has started educating its customers on 'capacity planning' to avoid problems like these to occur in all new countries it operates in, he adds.

Missteps like this of course highlight the difficulties Groupon faces, and will face in the future, as it tries to manage its rapid global expansion.

So I don't feel anything toward Groupon good or bad. I have taken advantage of some deals that fit me and it has worked out fine. Other deals though seem suspect because there seems few better ways for poor businesses to drive cash flow that they wouldn't have otherwise (even though it is at great cost to them) than to gather up a gaggle of bargain hunters who wouldn't have come by anyway. As a result, I stay away, especially on the restaurant side because I am not interested in helping a sinking food ship move their inventory into my belly.

So what is your take on this video as well as the real prospects for Groupon? Is this more hype than reality? Is this such a young vertical that Groupon's IPO and valuation are a chance to simply 'make hay while the sun is shining'?

Let's hear it.

Is Google Bowing To Pressure To Show More Competitive Offerings?

Posted: 17 Jan 2011 04:34 AM PST

For quite some time Google has been getting heat from just about every angle concerning the supposed favoritism it shows Google's own properties in their search results.

Individual companies have complained, government agencies have threatened (with the help of complaining companies) and those who just feel life is unjust have whined that Google doesn't play fair. I like to remind people that Google is a company, not a government and they owe the world nothing. Yup, that's nothing as in nada, zip, zero etc etc.

They do, however, provide work for a lot more than their 20,000 plus employees and one might argue that if they had not helped to develop the online space to the point it is at today that our overall economic condition might be a lot worse even than it currently is. But I digress.

All of that is to lead up the fact that Google is now making a shift in one area which shows they are either committed to giving searcher a broader view of their options or they are simply throwing complainers a bone. This olive branch of sorts could be setting the stage for the ability to point to how they really don't favor their own properties should they truly need to defend themselves in court.

This effort comes in the area of music videos to start with. As we know, YouTube is a premiere Google property and is the king of the online video world. There are other sites though that are showing videos as well and it appears that Google is giving them a fair shake in the SERP’s for these searches. See the example below with one of my all time favorite bands (Hey, Matt McGee of Search Engine Land used U2 (wonder why :-) ?) and Google used Michael Jackson (I REALLY wonder why) so here's my pitch for the ‘dark side’).

Google's blog post says the following about the change.

The feature scans the entire web for video content and algorithmically ranks the best sources for each song. Rather than return repetitive links, we group results for the same song together, making it easier to scan and choose the song you're looking for.

Of course, YouTube comes out on top of most of these searches but there is fair attention drawn to other options through the links in the result. Why would Google still put YouTube on top? Well, I suspect they would argue that algorithmically YouTube is the best option and it would be hard to dispute that.

So I suspect we can look to Google to do other things similar to this move that are great PR plays but don't really ding their efforts.

Now, once they start to give links to other Place Page competitors like these music video efforts, then there might be something to really talk about, right?
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