Facebook Readying To Allow Users To Say Where Their Face Is

Facebook is going to be joining the frenzy to help everyone not only know what people are thinking but also where they are thinking it. As we move more toward a world of this total view of another’s life you can be sure that Facebook wants to be involved. With the rising popularity of Foursquare, Gowalla and other location based “services” it makes sense that Facebook be here. In the bigger picture, however, this is likely to be more about taking on Google for local advertising dollars. After all, money has to be made correct?

The New York Times Bits section reports

Starting next month, the more than 400 million Facebook users could begin seeing a new kind of status update flow through their news feed: the current locations of their friends.

Facebook plans to take the wraps off a new location-based feature in late April at f8, the company’s yearly developer conference, according to several people briefed on the project, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss unannounced services.

In preparation for the introduction, Facebook updated its privacy policy last November. The new policy states: “When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post.”

On reports like this where there is the “unauthorized” source that is talking about unannounced services I always have the picture of a clandestine meeting under a gas lamp picture. Two shadowy figures exchange a note and keep walking on a lonely street in the fog kinda thing. Then I wonder who these “sources” are, if they are really unauthorized or are they part of the new age of PR which is more about leaking information than announcing it. Officially Facebook is staying mum.

Meredith Chin, a Facebook spokeswoman, said Tuesday that the company wasn’t ready to discuss any possible location-based features. “We’re constantly experimenting with new things around here, but we don’t have any details to share right now,” she said in an e-mail message.

It appears as if Facebook will remain friendly to the developer community on this one as well according to these “sources”. With estimates that 100 million users access Facebook daily via a mobile device (which represents 1 in 4 total Facebook users) this service is primed for quick adoption for those who like this kind of thing. As a result there is money to be made and allowing a business as usual attitude with the Facebook development community only makes sense.

Of course there will be plenty of concern about security and privacy because Facebook has turned itself into the poster child for how not to do new things and thus open the door to criticism. Maybe this information “leak” is designed to let the air out of any arguments that this new offering will face. I admit, my inner ‘conspiracy theorist’ is strong today.

So what do you think about this new, soon to be (we think), offering by Facebook? Of course, the details are sketchy but you must have an opinion on the general idea, right? Chime in. We’re listening but we’re not telling you from where .

Google: An Elephant Dancing Ballet

What really goes on inside Google? Wired magazine’s Stephen Levy takes a peek inside the world’s most popular search engine. While most of what he saw will come as no surprise to people who’ve been in search at least a year or two, we do get a glimpse of some of the mechanisms the company uses to keep ahead of the competition.

Google really does strive to be all things to all people. They want to—and have to—”answer” questions asked in thought fragments, interpret meaning from snippets of sense and return relevant results. So how do they do it, while serving billions of queries? The same way a lot of us have to do things at work: meetings.

For real.

Meetings are usually the antithesis of productivity, but naturally, at Google, that paradigm is turned on its head (or so it sounds—I’m sure they sit through many unproductive meetings, too). At a weekly Search Quality Launch Meeting, a team of engineers examine search results before and after little tweaks to the engine.

These little tweaks are constantly being tested by Google’s employees, quality testers—and you. Says Levy:

There are so many changes to measure that Google has discarded the traditional scientific nostrum that only one experiment should be conducted at a time. “On most Google queries, you’re actually in multiple control or experimental groups simultaneously,” says search quality engineer Patrick Riley. Then he corrects himself. “Essentially,” he says, “all the queries are involved in some test.” In other words, just about every time you search on Google, you’re a lab rat.

Levy also looks at “bi-gram breakage” improvements—i.e. when Google figured out that “new york” is a unit and “new york times” is a distinct unit—as well as earlier improvements like synonyms and early semantic search cues.

It’s good that a behemoth like Google is light enough on its feet to continually try to improve. If they rested on their laurels, they would have become obsolete years ago.

But my favorite part of the article was one of the comments. Despite Levy’s note at the beginning that Facebook, Twitter and Yelp point toward the disparate, fragmented future of search, and the fact that it’s actually possible to get off the Google-Aid, essentially, the commentator bemoaned our fate as Google will become our one and only choice for virtually all our Internet information needs.

The commentator included a link to his blog—hosted on Blogspot. (At least he noted that he likes Google !)

What do you think? Is Google-vergence inevitable? Are they doing enough to innovate? Do you see the little improvements?

NY Times to Put Blogs Behind Paywall

After years of debate and experimentation, the New York Times announced its decision of a pay-meter system last month. Although the switch isn’t due for more than a year, we’ve all had our questions. Last week, executives of the Times took the opportunity at the paidContent conference to answer those questions.

Unfortunately, it looks like they’re not all on the same page, especially when it comes to the many popular blogs hosted by the Times. Reports Felix Salmon of Reuters:

[Senior VP of Digital Operations Martin] Nisenholtz did say quite clearly that he expected ad revenue to go up rather than down, which implied to me that that paywall was going to be pretty porous. And [owner Arthur Sulzberger] said that “we are not trying to eliminate ourselves from the digital ecosystem”. But when I asked about specifics, it all got rather messy. It started when I asked whether the NYT’s own blogs would be counted towards the quota, and Nisenholtz replied that “our intention is to keep blogs behind the wall”.

Salmon also reports that the NYT confirmed to the WSJ that the blogs would be kept behind the paywall.

The meter system is designed to allow users to access a certain number of stories for free on the New York Times each month. For the occasional reader, that will probably be fine. However, for loyal followers of such blogs as the Freakonomics blog, it might not take long to meet your free article quota—and though there are many followers of NY Times blogs, I doubt that many of them would be willing to pay to read a blog. Salmon contends that the authors of the Freakonomics blog shouldn’t (and wouldn’t) stand for such an audience-cutting move.

RSS is another issue here: with the execs apparently confused about whether or not following a link from a third-party site would count toward your quota, they didn’t discuss whether following a link from a presumably-summary RSS subscription would count.

What do you think? Should the Times put blogs behind the paywall? Can they afford to sacrifice their readers—and possibly their blog authors?

Google Gives SMB Market Something to Look Forward To

Whether it is here or on some of the other places that I write about SMB Internet marketing, I talk a lot about the plight of the SMB (small and medium business) with regard to online marketing. Despite the size of the market that the SMB represents it has always been under served.

There are a few basic reasons for this. Most SMB owners don’t have the resources whether they be money, knowledge or skilled employees that can carry out Internet marketing and social media campaigns. The biggest barrier in this marketplace is likely money because credit for the SMB is incredibly tight thus making it harder to pay for advertising and promotions as cash flow is suffering as well.

So what’s the SMB to do? Well, Google is providing a new opportunity that is currently being tested in the Houston market which essentially combines organic and paid results but at a much reduced cost to the business owner. The New York Times reports on a classic SMB tale of the need to be online but the resources that limit success

Jason Cowie, the owner of Kingpinz Skateboard and Snowboard Shop in Houston, has done a pretty good job of getting his business noticed on the Web. Just type “skateboards in Houston” on a search engine, and his store will be among the first listed.

But one of his sure-fire ways to drive Web visitors and foot traffic — buying search ads on Google — got to be pretty expensive. Mr. Cowie, whose shop is just 1,000 square feet, found himself bidding for placement against deep-pocketed national chains, and having to spend $1,500 to $2,000 a month just to keep up.

Google’s response is one that allows the SMB to have something that stands out on a SERP (search engine result page) but also takes a swipe at the old guard of SMB advertising; the Yellow Pages

Now Mr. Cowie is trying something new: for a flat fee of $25 a month, he is making his listings on Google stand out. Whenever his shop comes up in a search page or on a Google map, it is adorned with a bright yellow tag. The tag links to the Kingpinz Web site, but these enhanced listings, as the ads are called, can also link to a coupon, store directions, a photograph or a video of a business, or, in the case of a restaurant, a menu or reservations page.

Here’s how this looks to the searcher

Google knows that the SMB struggles to pay for AdWords campaigns of impact and that the future is going to be more online than off. Mr. Cowie echoes that sentiment and Google understands that it may have been missing a real easy mark.

“I think Google is going to be the new Yellow Pages,” Mr. Cowie said. “More and more of these younger kids are used to Google. They are looking at their phones rather than opening up a phone book.”

But Google’s auction-driven search advertising system, AdWords, has confounded many small businesses. So Google tried a new course. ”We are acknowledging that AdWords is really complex for small-business owners,” said John Hanke, a vice president of product management for Google.

So let’s do the math. While Mr. Cowie was spending $2,000 per month on AdWords and struggling he can now gain some advantage over his competition for just $25. In order for Google to recoup that $2,000 from this customer they need to sign up 80 businesses for $25 bucks a month. I think that should be pretty easy for Google.

Of course, if this rolls out to the rest of the world we will need to keep an eye open for what happens when everyone likes the idea of a cheap boost to their ad and the nice yellow “sticker” is just one of 7 or 10 in a maps result. Well, I suspect there will be the $100 per month “blue ribbon of Google search excellence” just waiting to help out the SMB.

Your thoughts?

Google Blurs The Line Between Paid & Unpaid Results Again

Google has a new program that allows local businesses to get paid listings that appear within what’s known as the 7-pack of local listings. But do those listings violate the Federal Trade Commission’s guidelines about proper disclosure of paid search ads? Probably not, but they do seem confusing.
The New York Times had a good article [...]

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YouTube Video Makes FDIC Blink

Watching video clips is a very popular pastime in the US and the rest of the world. Hey, it sure beats getting outside and taking a walk in that nasty fresh air. As a result of our obsession with this media there is some opportunity to do some real harm to a reputation if a group decided to do so. One such instance has made the F.D.I.C (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) take action because they claim a video making the viral rounds is just plain false. Whether it is or not may not be enough to fix the damage.

The New York Times reports

All week long, officials at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation watched with growing dismay as a YouTube video ricocheted around the Internet. In 4 minutes 26 seconds, the clip asserted that the agency’s sale last year of the assets of the failed bank IndyMac to a group of private investors was a sweetheart deal.

Finally, F.D.I.C. officials decided they had had enough.

“It is unfortunate but necessary to respond to blatantly false claims in a Web video that is being circulated” about the creation of OneWest Bank out of the assets of IndyMac, the agency’s chief spokesman, Andrew Gray, said in a written statement late Friday.

In the statement, he went on to say that the video “has no credibility” and was replete with “falsehoods.”

The video has since been taken down but there is another version currently on YouTube. Now from an online reputation monitoring perspective these two videos seem rather innocuous. The first had 7,667 views before it was taken down while the new video only has 139 views (at the time of this writing). So why is the FDIC in such a tizzy about a video with limited reach that is, according to them, chock full of lies? Would anyone have known about it or would it have spread more if they had just left it alone? Certainly having a story written in the New York Times and bringing it to the attention of people like myself can’t help. I can honestly say that I would not have had a clue about this video had it not been for the article in the NYT announcing the issue. Now I am helping to spread the video’s reach. In the ORM it is tricky to know when to let sleeping dogs lie. Now a video with no credibility may have the perception of credibility which is even worse.

The unusual statement by the F.D.I.C. was not only an effort at rumor control and a nod to the power of online media but also a defense of the agency at a time when Congress is contemplating a broad overhaul of financial regulations.

It was also the latest episode in the tangled afterlife of IndyMac Bancorp, which the government seized after a run on the bank in July 2008, in one of the largest bank failures ever.

It’s the “nod to the power of online media” that all marketers need to pay much closer attention to. The online reputation monitoring and management space is still somewhat “cottagey” (another made up blogger word). While there is a growing concern over what is being said and done online there is precious little activity to monitor it. As a result, the way that these matters are handled often turn into case studies regarding what not to do.

Ask Southwest Airlines how they feel today about the power of online media when an influencer in the social media space has an issue with their experience. Are you really paying attention to what is being said about you online? If you are, do have plans in place in case something gets out of control? Do you have plans to keep things from getting out of control? Have you ever stopped to consider the cost of a negative report, be it true or false, to your company?

If you have haven’t you are playing the marketer’s version of Russian roulette. As more and more people find out just how disruptive they can be online there are going to be more and more bullets in the chamber. That is unless of course you do something about it.

Sergey Brin Might Do Google Buzz

Want to follow Google cofounder Sergey Brin on Google’s new microblogging service, Google Buzz? Brin says he might join in the future.
During the Google Buzz launch event, Brin spoke of being a big fan, even using it to gather opinions internally at Google about a New York Times opinion piece he was writing about Google [...]

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Please Email This Article; Researchers Say You’ll Feel Better

If fear, scandal, sex, and humor sell newspapers, it stands to reason that those topics would make for the most popular articles on news sites and blogs. Right?

Wrong!

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have intensively studied the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles and discovered that it was an entirely unexpected emotion that caused the average reader to share an article.

“Emotion in general leads to transmission, and awe is quite a strong emotion,” [Dr. Berger] said. “If I’ve just read this story that changes the way I understand the world and myself, I want to talk to others about what it means. I want to proselytize and share the feeling of awe. If you read the article and feel the same emotion, it will bring us closer together.”

Apparently science-themed articles were among the most popular, with RNA, deer optics, paleontology and cosmology, among those most emailed.

Now, while the study appears to be very well constructed, there’s just one major flaw that I see here:

These were New York Times readers!

While we have many wonderful NYT readers that visit Marketing Pilgrim each day, I’d say that our general demographic is not quite the same. That said, you may want to consider how closely you mimic the NYT’s writing style. Here’s what worked for them:

More emotional stories were more likely to be e-mailed, the researchers found, and positive articles were shared more than negative ones. Longer articles generally did better than shorter articles, although Dr. Berger said that might just be because the longer articles were about more engaging topics.

For me, I think I’ll stick to scaremongering, controversial studies, and wild rumors!

Can Kindle Resist Apple’s Attempt to Douse It?

Since its unveiling last month, the iPad has been labeled a Kindle killer. The parallels are obvious—the largest (and newest) Kindle has the same size screen, both have Internet connectivity, and both can be used to read books. But that just about sums up the Kindle’s selling points, and the iPad’s features list continues on out the door. So could a full-color touchscreen tablet computer and a B&W eReader really be considered the competitors the media continue to make them out to be?

Heck yes, if Amazon has anything to say about it. Last week, Amazon acquired touchscreen maker TouchCo. The small startup had developed a new way to add touch screen technology. (Kindle direct competitor the Sony eReader already has a touchscreen version, which outsells its cheaper alternative.)

Meanwhile, the technology for adding color to the E Ink device has long been in the works. The exactly-like-paper interface has long been the biggest selling point of eReaders, but despite the development of a color version by E Ink four years ago, nearly all E Ink displays are in black and white. The acquisition of creator E Ink by PVI last year seemed to pave the way for a color Kindle by the end of this year.

But does Kindle really care? They’ve released an app for the iPhone, enabling the Kindle’s parent company, Amazon, to continue to benefit from other devices. If users are willing to put up with the eyestrain from reading hundreds of thousands of words on an LCD screen, Amazon is willing to take their money on ebooks. (We can debate over how much Amazon makes or loses per ebook right now—their ultimate goal could just be to make us all dependent on them for all our ebook needs.)

Then again, maybe they do. The New York Times takes a look at job listings for Amazon’s Lab 126, developer of the Kindle:

One job opening in particular, for a Hardware Display Manager, tells the applicant that “you will know the LCD business and key players in the market.” The key point here is the word “LCD,” which means the Kindle is possibly exploring color (unless they are hiring an LCD manager to simply gain an understanding of the color-display market).

Other job openings include Wi-Fi specialists (the current Kindle has only a 3G wireless connection), and openings for someone to “lead the software development teams that develop and maintain the applications.” The applications division could signal a move to create more apps for the Kindle, or someone who will manage the latest app store developments after Amazon announced a new software development kit was released last month to independent programmers.

What do you think? Is Amazon gearing up to pit the Kindle against the iPad—and will it be enough?

C Suite Resignation Via Twitter

When people in the industry or anywhere else for that matter look to C-level participation in social media Sun’s CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, is viewed as a pioneer. He was the first Fortune 500 CEO to blog. Well, now he has broken some new ground by being the first CEO of his stature (or maybe any for that matter) to tweet his resignation. Yup, he’s given his last 140 characters on behalf of Sun Microsystems.

The New York Times Bits column says:

Jonathan Schwartz, the last chief executive of Sun Microsystems, has become the first Fortune 200 boss to tweet his resignation.

Late Wednesday night, Mr. Schwartz used Twitter to publish a haiku about his exit from Oracle, which just completed its purchase of Sun last week.

“Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more,” Mr. Schwartz wrote.

Mr. Schwartz has been fond of using the Internet as a soapbox. At Sun, he became the first chief executive of a major company to put up his own blog. Mr. Schwartz also pushed the Securities and Exchange Commission to put blogs on equal footing with press releases and filings when it comes to disclosing critical business matters to investors.

Considering the bad blood between Schwartz and his new boss Larry Ellison the resignation is not a surprise. Ellison last week said he expected the resignation was coming. Using Twitter as part of his resignation ‘process’ may have been a surprise, though. You have to give Schwartz credit for going out with a tweet.

Now it’ not like we are rooting for this to become a trend but I would suspect that many of you have your own favorite CEO that you would love to see craft a 140 character exit. (If you want to get creative and make a few for some of those folks feel free to leave them in the comments here). Are there any remaining social media firsts for business that you can think of?

In the end, what might be the best thing about all of this is the message of hope that we should all be focusing on that Schwartz left in an e-mail about his resignation.

As for what’s next, Mr. Schwartz said in an e-mail: “In the short run, I’m planning to spend some long overdue time with my family. Longer run, with a few million businesses and a few billion consumers on the Web, rumor has it there are some interesting opportunities to be had.”

Family time and opportunity. Now, that’s a good message and only 27 characters with spaces!

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