Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim: More Than Just A Check In Play for foursquare

While I am admittedly not too enamored with geo-location services personally there is little denying the rise in popularity. Foursquare, Gowalla and others are experiencing some of the ‘hockey stick’ growth that was once reserved for Twitter and Facebook.

The problem as of late has been the nagging question of “What else is there to do other than just ‘check in’? Make believe badges and ‘mayorships’ can only go so far with most people. Well, if foursquare can do what is being reported in ReadWriteWeb even I could find myself playing along. The site reports

Looking at life through rose-colored glasses? How about walking through your town and seeing it as the Huffington Post or the Independent Film Channel sees it? IFC announced a new campaign this morning with leading location-based social network Foursquare that will allow you to do just that. The Huffington Post launched a Foursquare layer today as well.

IFC polled its member base for short descriptions of their favorite places in the towns they lived in or visited, then picked the place-descriptions that best suited the IFC’s brand (“Always on, slightly off”) to upload into a Foursquare database. Foursquare users can now opt-into getting those tips pushed to them whenever they check in near one of the annotated locations. It’s a chance to effectively say, “I want to see this town as IFC fans see it.” For marketers, this has got to be incredibly appealing, and for urban explorers it could be one of the best examples yet of effective Augmented Reality.

Now we are getting somewhere. People generally read or watch things that are of interest to them and a similar group of people. That group may have very eclectic tastes which is one of the appeals of being associated with it. Now, you can walking through an area and get the point of view of those eclectic folks. Imagine walking down a street in Greenwich Village and you told that there is a great ‘hole in the wall’ bar or restaurant that you would have never known about but your IFC or whatever minded friends have let you in on it through foursquare. This could be interesting.

Of course, these services could only be opt-in because of the distinct nature of each brands eye view of an area. It’s likely that those tuning into a channel like IFC would have little interest in what the Home & garden crowd wants to ‘find’. That’s the beauty of this kind of service and that is not lost on marketers.

ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick says it very well

I’m ready to follow the local historical society, an environmental justice organization or two, perhaps an art-graffiti-watchers association – the possibilities are nearly endless. Imagine allowing background location tracking and notification for some layers. “To see the world through the lenses of my favorite organizations” would be a nice addition to the reasons why people say they use check-in apps.

Can Facebook implement this kind of feature once location is rolled into its service? It’s a little hard to imagine; this feels like a feature that would best come from a service with location at its core.

Ahh yes. The great potential Facebook differentiator for foursquare. With the looming threat of location based services coming from social media’s 900 pound gorilla, foursquare needs to be seen as something more than just a novelty game for people to get tired of.

Could this be the way of the future for the location-based services of the world? At least it looks like a good start and it could actually be something that brings more people like myself into the fold.

This trend may be worth keeping an eye on for sure...Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim: Will Your Life Be Better in 10 Years Because of the Internet?

Assuming we are granted seeing the next 10 years unfold, how will the Internet impact your life and in particular your social interactions?

According to ‘experts’ (overused and often undeserved title alert!) a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, life is gonna be good because of the social web. Honestly, since most of these folks probably depend on the Internet to make a living are they going to say anything else?

The study revealed

The social benefits of internet use will far outweigh the negatives over the next decade, according to experts. They say this is because email, social networks, and other online tools offer “low friction” opportunities to create, enhance, and rediscover social ties that make a difference in people’s lives. The internet lowers traditional communications constraints of cost, geography, and time; and it supports the type of open information sharing that brings people together.

While they acknowledge that use of the internet as a tool for communications can yield both positive and negative effects, a significant majority of technology experts and stakeholders participating in the fourth Future of the Internet survey say it improves social relations and will continue to do so through 2020.
Please continue reading here: Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim: More Predictions About Online Advertising’s Future

It looks like the mid-year re-evaluations and updates to the “start of year” predictions for the future of advertising are rolling in at a rapid pace. Today’s entry comes from one of the largest advertising firms in the world, Interpublic and its Magna Global unit. The news is good for advertising overall and particularly for the online segment as it is set to move into the number 2 slot behind TV in the race to be the largest advertising medium in the world.

MediaPost reports

The agency, long respected as Madison Avenue’s definitive source for the global ad economy, projected worldwide online ad spending would surpass the $100 billion mark, totaling $103 billion in 2015, due largely to an expansion of online advertising inventory.

The prediction comes as Magna dramatically upgrades its overall ad spending estimate, predicting that global ad spending now is on base to expand 4.2% in 2010, nearly double the 2.4% rate of growth the agency estimated in its last published estimate at the end of 2009.

So it looks like the predictions are coming in that we may have finally hit bottom in this massive retreat over the past two years. At least that’s what is being forecast by advertising crystal balls throughout the industry.

One interesting point covered by the forecast is that newspaper advertising

will continue to grow modestly – up 1.8% in constant currency terms over the next five years – despite sustained declines in many markets

This is a very different picture than what is usually painted regarding the newspaper industry. There are several factors at play in this with the main one being these numbers are worldwide in scope. There are still many places on earth where the online culture is not as ingrained as in the US. It’s an interesting caution when talking about newspapers as a whole because it is likely that further declines will take place in online centric cultures.

So TV will still dominate but even its impact is being diminished as the lines blur and create some confusion as to what TV really is. With the traditional broadcast delivery being supplemented and often replaced by online options the fragmentation of this medium will make for some interesting decisions moving forward. Likely to benefit will be the online advertising world as more ads are served in relation to video content being used for both broadcast and online delivery.

So things are looking up to some degree. My hope is that when things finally do start to really turn around that we can keep our wits about ourselves and not get caught up in hype for hype’s sake. If anything has been proven in the past few years is that that mindset never gets great results.
Agree or disagree?...Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim: Twitter Announces Location Based Tweet Tags

Twitter is officially in the geo-location game. Yesterday it announced the roll out of its Twitter tweet tagging service which will give the location of where you are tweeting from to those interested in knowing those things about you. The Twitter blog describes it in the context of the World Cup horn blowing soccer matches.

If you’re like everyone at the Twitter office, you’re going crazy about the World Cup. When turning to Twitter to keep up with the current game, it helps to know where a Tweet is coming from—is that person watching the game on TV or is he actually in the stadium? To help answer that question, we’re excited to announce Twitter Places on twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com. Starting today, you can tag Tweets with specific places, including all World Cup stadiums in South Africa, and create new Twitter Places. You can also click a Twitter Place within a Tweet to see recent Tweets from a particular location. Try it out during the next match—you will be able to see Tweets coming from the stadium.

Here is a picture of what these location updates will look like.



Other features include Foursquare and Gowalla integration, API functionality for the service and browser capabilities that include Safari, IE, Firefox and Chrome. The service will be available in 65 countries over the next week or so and is being developed for Twitter apps for the iPhone, Android devices and the Blackberry.

If only the Twitter service could stay up long enough for this to be truly useful ……Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim: Ad Spend Growth Slow But It’s There

Everyone in the advertising and marketing world would love to see everything get back to the halcyon days of ad spending like there was no tomorrow which seemed to exist prior to our current economic climate. Well, it’s OK to dream but if that dream interferes with the reality of a situation then you have trouble. A recent report on ad spending into the future produced by PriceWaterhouseCoopers and reported by the New York Times Media Decoder blog gives some insight into what may be the real situation.

Advertising spending in the United States will not begin to grow again until next year, according to an annual forecast from PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The 11th annual entertainment and media outlook report, to be released on Tuesday morning, predicts that ad spending will fall 0.5 percent this year compared with last year.

That is a marked improvement from 2009, when ad spending fell 15.2 percent from 2008, according to the report, but the trend would still going in the wrong direction from the perspective of Madison Avenue.

Although ad spending will increase in 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014, the report forecasts, the total in 2014 will still be 9 percent less than it was in 2007.

This report is for overall ad spending so the silver lining for the Internet marketing crowd comes in the prediction that by 2014 the spending levels will exceed that of 2009. This prediction includes Internet, television and radio. While it is not much to be excited about considering the years or seemingly limitless growth (it was a new medium after all which we tend to ignore), it is still better than newspapers, magazines and directories which are not predicted to get back to 2009 spending levels even by 2014.

So while this is not exactly the kind of news you really can get excited about maybe it’s the kind of news we should expect more often. Gone are the days of hyped up numbers that lead to irrational expectations by the industry as a whole. Maybe being firmly based in reality will be a welcome change. Of course, we can’t let the social media crowd know that because then that would rain on their current parade of hype that continues to spread.

So while it is interesting for a group as powerful and respected as PWC to look into their crystal ball it by no means is definitely going to play out this way. In fact, we find here at Marketing Pilgrim that some of the best measures of what is really going on can be given by our readers who are in the trenches and doing this work day in and day out.

So what are you seeing? Is there a “rebound” in overall advertising spend? Do you think the Internet sector will rebound more quickly? If so, what will drive the growth?

Let us hear your take on this...Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim: Why Google Wants the Entire World to Upload an Image to Its Homepage

See that? That is Google’s homepage today. For everyone…in the world!

When Google announced that it would let users upload images to its homepage, it was cute. It gave me the ammo to suggest that Google was copying Bing–which was the first big search engine to go with the background images.

That’s still a legitimate observation, but here’s another one that I’ve not seen mentioned.

Google wants you to add an image to its homepage because that is exactly what you do to the background of your desktop, right? You customize your desktop with an image that makes you happy, makes you smile….makes you want to see your desktop!

That’s right, this is not so much Google copying Bing, but Google trying to make its homepage your new desktop. Google’s not just taking on Bing, but Windows 7 and Mac OS X.

Think about it. Bing shows you some random image on its homepage–to give you something to look at. Google’s letting you upload your own image so you’ll come back…over and over again...Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim: Google Now Fully Caffeinated

In August of 2009 Caffeine was introduced to parts of Google’s ecosystem and there has been plenty of speculation as to just how much it has impacted results. Of course, whenever anything is rolled out to just a percentage of the Google search as a whole it can be tough to see just what it is actually doing.

Now there is no more need to wonder as Google has rolled out Caffeine in all its glory. The Official Google blog says

Today, we’re announcing the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine. Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.

So there you have it. When you read that statement it is pretty amazing that there is a “new” web indexing system from the leader in search. So what brought this on?

So why did we build a new search indexing system? Content on the web is blossoming. It’s growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average webpage is richer and more complex. In addition, people’s expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.

Google’s old system was layered and it updated slowly compared to the Caffeine experience which is diagrammed below.

Here are some fun facts that Google shared as well:

* Every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second.
* Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day.
* You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.

So Caffeine is here. What do you think? Have you had enough caffeine yet to comment?
Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim: Ten Online Reputation Management Tips BP Can Use Today

Don’t you hate it when bloggers complain about a company’s actions, yet don’t offer any advice or alternative solutions?

That’s kind of what I did yesterday–when criticizing BP. Well, shortly after publishing that post, I turned to Twitter and started tweeting random ideas that BP could use to be more, well, Radically Transparent. The tips literally took me 10 minutes to come up with, yet were well received by those following me.

So, I thought I’d close the loop on yesterday’s post and share them here.

BP oil spill crisis tip #1: Make each BP station a place for people to share concerns & suggestions. Instead of letting them boycott their local BP station–and drive on by–why not set them up as polling stations. Let people stop in and share their complaints, concerns and suggestions.

BP oil spill crisis tip #2: Hold local town-hall meetings. Let them vent to the CEO directly, instead of venting online.

BP oil spill crisis tip #3: Invite someone like @Scobleizer to follow the BP CEO with a video camera. Show how hard he’s working each day, so people can see he’s as concerned as he says he is.

BP oil spill crisis tip #4: Set aside a large fund for clean-up – say $20 billion – with a promise that any left over will go to environmental non-profits.

BP oil spill crisis tip #5: If you let Facebook users comment on your fan page, maybe they wouldn’t feel the need to create alternative complaint page! Open up your Facebook page to comments and take them like a man!

BP oil spill crisis tip #6: You have a Flickr page, but how about a Flickr Group? Let users submit photos of areas that need clean-up, tagged with GPS coordinates so BP can react.

BP oil spill crisis tip #7: People care about their own back yard. Set-up a Google map that lets me click & see info/videos/images of how the oil effects in my town!

BP oil spill crisis tip #8: Provide a timeline of…What happened? How’d it happen? What’s been tried? What failed? What worked? What now? What next? In other words, be Radically Transparent! ;-)

BP oil spill crisis tip #9: For your TV ads, don’t show me your CEO in a clean, pressed shirt. Show him with his sleeves rolled up & helping…you know, like he really cares!

BP oil spill crisis tip #10: If I drank a shot for each corporate soundbite in this http://gri.ms/KSB3 – my liver would need removing. Talk to us in English!

BP oil spill crisis tip #11: OK, so there wasn’t an 11th tip…at least not one I’m going to provide for free. BP knows how to find me. ;-)

What tips do you have for BP? How should they handle this reputation crisis?
Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim: Social Media Marketing Magazine Launches Online

he social media space has plenty of information flying around every second of every day. If you don’t have any real work to do just spend your day reading articles recommended by every social media practitioner and their brother. You’ll be busy.

In an effort to ‘cut to the chase’, get through the clutter and offer some different perspectives on social media marketing a new digital offering, Social Media Marketing Magazine is being unveiled today.The online publication is described on their site

Social Media Marketing (SMM) Magazine’s innovative editorial approach features the expertise of a number of marketing leaders from the business, publishing, and academic communities.

With their unique perspectives, SMM Magazine helps you navigate through the social media maze and emerge with a more clear understanding of how to achieve your marketing goals by applying effective strategies, tactics, and best practices.

The magazine is the brainchild of Kent Huffman, CMO of BearCom Wireless and Chuck Martin, Director, Center for Media Research, MediaPost, and Chairman / CEO of NFI Research. Both have very deep marketing backgrounds and are evolving right along with the rest of the marketing world as social media becomes a natural addition to the Internet marketing mix and the overall marketing mix of companies and organizations in marketing’s new world order.

The initial issue features articles from social media heavyweights like former Kodak CMO Jeffrey Hayzlett, author David Meerman Scott and Stanford University professor, Dr. Jennifer Aaker.

In the interest of full disclosure there is a blog and there are many folks included in that initial effort including a post from yours truly.

So take a look and see what is being said about social media marketing not just from your peers but from the perspectives of academia and authors as well. In an industry of fragmented content about this ever-emerging discipline, Social Media Marketing Magazine may be the needed aggregator of content and talent that help make sense of it all.

When you have visited the magazine let us know your thoughts here at Marketing Pilgrim.

Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim: Google’s Data Collection Practices Gets Canada’s Attention …. Again

Google must be pretty excited that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have been under intense scrutiny as of late regarding privacy. Why would they celebrate that other than it being a stumbling block to a “frienemy”? The more that Facebook gets the privacy stink eye from the world the less attention can be paid to Google’s own battles over their alleged breaches of privacy.

Google has been under scrutiny by Germany regarding their collection of wireless network data that occurred while their little Google Maps mobiles went around taking pictures of the world. Now Canada can be added to the list of countries that are looking into this practice. We know from past experience that Canada fights hard when it comes to privacy concerns (just ask Facebook).

Reuters reports:

Canadian Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said on Tuesday that she was concerned about the privacy implications stemming from the collection of data from wireless networks in Canada, the United States and other countries.

“We have a number of questions about how this collection could have happened,” she said in a statement. “We’ve determined that an investigation is the best way to find the answers.”

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has already begun an informal inquiry into the matter.

Google said in a statement that it would cooperate with authorities to answer their questions and address their concerns. It has previously denied any wrongdoing.

Google has been on the fringes of the “too much information” argument with its Street View product since its inception so this is familiar territory to a degree. Lately, though, the additional revelation that data from wireless networks has been collected along with the ‘accidental’ collection of data run on those networks has raised new red flags about Google’s policies.

Canada is not alone in its concern.

Suits have been filed in Washington D.C., California, Massachusetts and Oregon by people who accuse Google of violating their privacy by collecting data from open Wi-Fi networks.

U.S. lawmakers have asked the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to look into the matter, and a district court in Portland, Oregon, has ordered Google to make two copies of a hard drive containing data from the United States and turn them over to the court.

So where should we as marketers stand on all of this? I notice that most of our readers stay mum on these discussions and my suspicion is that everyone is dying to get their hands on more data but doesn’t want to be known for having it. It’s the Internet marketers’ ultimate Catch-22. You need the data but having the data puts you and your company at risk of being labeled a privacy violator in the name of a few more sales. Ask Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook crew how that is working out for them these days.

So where is the line? Is there really a line yet or are we just going to be continually pushing the current privacy boundaries to loosen people’s tolerance for these ‘breaches’ to the point where everyone just rolls over, plays dead and goes along with the Google party line? That comes from their CEO who has said “”If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”?

Oooops, sorry, that was from December of 2009. As of May 2010 in response to this current flap his take as reported by the Guardian is:

Google chief executive, Eric Schmidt, has defended his company’s record on privacy in the wake of the discovery that its Street View camera cars had accidentally recorded data from unsecured domestic Wi-Fi networks, insisting that Google has the “most consumer-centric privacy policy of any service online”.

Gee, it’s so hard to keep up with what needs to be said at any given moment to do the corporate CYA dance, isn’t it? Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim: Twitter Users Refer Videos – A Lot

Twitter does a lot of things for a lot of people. It’s obviously not for everyone (which is a dirty little secret of the social media industry) but it is very powerful with the right folks. One of the uses of Twitter is passing along favorite video clips. In fact, some recent ‘research’ by TubeMogul as reported by Mashable shows far and away Twitter’s dominance in passing video through the social graph (or whatever pithy term you want to call social networking as a whole). Here’s a picture to ‘prove’ it by examining the growth of this activity.Continue here Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim: Facebook’s Simplified Privacy Controls Will Start Appearing Tomorrow

Now that Facebook has taken the obligatory ‘walk of shame’ following “The Great Privacy Train Wreck of ‘10” it has to actually do something. Talk is cheap and Facebook has been doing an awful lot of talking as of late. Thankfully at TechCrunch Disrupt they are starting the rumor that their action is just a day away.

TechCrunch tells us

On stage today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City, Facebook’s vice president of product Chris Cox announced that starting tomorrow, Facebook will be rolling out “drastically simplified” and improved privacy controls. He didn’t give any details, but did suggest that they should alleviate some of the recent privacy problems Facebook has faced.

While giving no details gives little satisfaction to those who are curious at least there is something to look forward to right?

How about we try this. Why don’t we have the readers of Marketing Pilgrim put together their dream privacy ‘capabilities’ as it relates to Facebook and see how the new and improved privacy controls measure up when / if then magically appear tomorrow? (Don’t you love how these things are ‘rolled out” rather than just applied to everyone all at once?)

Tell us what you think would be the best thing that Facebook could do to truly ‘make good’ on this one. Is there a real chance for them to turn this around? Also, do you truly trust that anything they do and say today will be in place for any serious amount of time before Facebook takes another swing at getting advertisers what they need which is your private information?

Sound off, Pilgrims, while you have the chance because tomorrow we can only react to what Facebook does. Today, at least we can pretend like our opinion matters.

Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community
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Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim: Google Takes Aim and Fires at Apple

As one might expect, Google is pretty confident when it comes to just about everything. You have to be to do what they have done in a short period of time relative to most business success stories. Of course, taking the lead position in the development of the Internet Age will do that, won’t it.

Google also is very interested in maintaining that position as the shift toward a more robust mobile computing and communication world is underway (it may even be for real this time!). So when Google’s Vic Gundotra spoke yesterday at the Google I/O developer conference he left little room for speculation as to Google’s intentions for the Android OS and who it is looking to ‘take out’. At about the 3 minute mark of the video below Gundotra takes aim directly at, you guessed it, Apple.



So we should be looking for a true battle of these titans because Google is making a dent in the valuable market of mobile communications. They are going about it in a very different way than Apple which comes as no surprise. What may be a surprise, however, is the speed with which Google and Android are impacting the space.

I know many iPhone app developers who shrug off the Android’s advances and feel that Apple will win the day in the long run. They may be right. What is not going to happen, however, is that Apple will have the runaway success many had predicted. Apple’s first position in the market is their strength right now but Google’s open approach and ability to leverage all of its other market leading capabilities are hard to compete with over time. Couple that with an aggressive stance on going after Apple and the way Steve Jobs views the world and we are in for quite a show.

Who will come out on top? Let’s hear your thoughts...Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim: Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales Up 17% in Q1

Whether it’s the real year of mobile or not doesn’t matter much really. Although we like to try to pinpoint these types of ‘movements’ by some magical moment in time where the switch was suddenly turned on it’s not how it happens. What does happen is year over year signs and hints appear saying that shifts are truly taking place and we just slide into a new era of communication regardless of what name we give it.

A study by Gartner shows that in year over year numbers there was increase worldwide in number of mobile phones purchased. In fact that number was up 17%. In these uncertain economic times it is of interest to see what people view as essential beyond the obvious food, clothing and shelter. Apparently, having a mobile phone is pretty high up the food chain.

The chart below tells a story that will interest many especially in the US. While Nokia still is the worldwide leader in mobile phone sales (does anyone in the US still use one?) the real trend is in the proliferation of iPhone and Android OS devices.

Note that all other OS’s for mobile platforms experienced a drop in market share year over year but the jumps by Android and Apple are striking. I suspect that when we see the numbers in Q1 of 2011 that there will be an even greater closing of the gap between other operating systems and the two up and coming powerhouses.

With Android running on multiple manufacturers’ devices it is likely that there will be significant gains that may even help it pass the Apple especially as the folks in Cupertino continue to make moves that keeps Apple in its own, albeit a highly successful and profitable, box.

Who’s going to be the biggest loser? I have my money on RIM. The image of Blackberrys being the corporate “go to” for mobile communications is quickly losing its shine. Android devices, in particular, continue to strengthen its ability to deliver SMB and small enterprise services that Google supplies to millions of businesses. After all that is part of Google’s play. In the world of “It’s the application, stupid!” Google is positioned well and RIM is simply not. Where the iPhone falls on the corporate use continuum is a wild card for sure.

So how do see this playing out and how will it impact your marketing efforts? What kind of apps and services have you engaged in to spread your brand into the mobile space? Who will be the winners and losers from your perspective?
Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim: YouTube At 5: Over 2 Billion Views Served Per Day

YouTube is celebrating its 5th birthday this year. Needless to say they have done more in their first five years than most. Not the least of the accomplishments is the sheer enormity of the following point of interest (I refuse to say fact): YouTube is streaming 2 billion views per day currently. To put some perspective on this, albeit that the company is proclaiming it, that “nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major US television networks combined”.

TechCrunch gives us a little more info into how YouTube is celebrating:

To help commemorate the occasion, YouTube is also launching a new channel of videos called “My YouTube Story”, which includes a collection of clips featuring people around the world talking about how YouTube has changed their lives. The initial batch of clips were filmed by documentary filmmaker Stephen Higgins, and some of them are quite touching. YouTube users can upload their own video stories as well; YouTube will be plotting these videos on a global map, and will also offer an interactive timeline of clips.

The world of online video continues to explode and marketers continue to try to build the next great viral piece. If there are this many eyeballs looking for something to look at on a daily basis, that quest is likely to accelerate. Of course, unless you can tie yourself to some freakish celeb or you want a “stupid human trick” to promote your brand or product there might be limitations.

Here are a few fun facts that YouTube is sharing on their special occasion.

2 Billion views a day
3rd most visited website (Alexa)
Localized in 23 countries across 24 different languages
15 The average number of minutes people spend on the site each day
24 Hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute
45 Million home page impressions every day
70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the U.S.
100 Years of video scanned by copyright managent technology, Content ID, every day
1700 Years it would take you to watch the hundreds of millions of videos on YouTube

Now the real telltale sign of just what purpose YouTube may be serving can be seen in the most viewed videos of all time.

Top 5 Most Viewed Videos of all time

Lady Gaga – Bad Romance with 196,115,524 views
Charlie bit my finger with 185,714,255 views
Evolution of Dance with 142,679,738 views
Miley Cyrus – 7 Things with 117,413,641
Pitbull – I Know You Want Me with 118,410,161

So while 2 billion is a big number how this milestone contributes to any progress the human race has made is left for others to debate.

Happy 5th birthday, YouTube! Thanks for the great time wasters! Here’s to many more years of serving up the least common denominator of human capabilities! Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim: Oracle’s Larry Ellison Weighs In On CEO Blogging

This week one of the richest and most influential men in business and the world, Larry Ellison, founder and CEO of Oracle Systems, gave his opinion on corporate blogging. Well, at least he gave his opinion on one attempt at corporate blogging and it strikes right at the core of some things that the social media and Internet marketing communities claim as near and dear to their heart.

Ellison attacked what many have held up as one of the prime examples of a company creating content through executive blogs and more. In fact, he didn’t just attack it; he crushed it. Please continue reading @ Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim: Google Interviews Conan O’Brien; Hilarity Ensues

There are two things you won’t typically find me doing:

1. Watching any YouTube video longer than 3 minutes–who has the time for that?

2. Watching Conan O’Brien–I don’t normally stay up that late.

So, trust me when I say that all 48 minutes of Conan’s interview at the Googleplex is worth watching. I laughed so hard, I may have to start drinking coffee at night so I can stay awake when Coco debuts on TBS–that, or just set the DVR. ;-)

Enjoy! Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim: McDonald’s Is McReady to McUse Facebook Location Service

Last month speculation swirled about the upcoming location services that Facebook was working on getting to market. With the interest in Foursquare, Gowalla and MyTown gaining more and more momentum there isn’t a better time for Facebook to come in and put their giant footprint on this developing landscape.

AdAge reports that McDonald’s is already working with the social networking behemoth around this service and will be front and center when Facebook delivers the anticipated functionality.

Facebook is preparing to launch location-based status updates for its users. But the social network is also planning to offer it to marketers, including McDonald’s.

As early as this month, the social-networking site will give users the ability to post their location within a status update. McDonald’s, through digital agency Tribal DDB, Chicago, is building an app with Facebook would allow users to check in at one of its restaurants and have a featured product appear in the post, such as an Angus Quarter Pounder, say executives close to the deal.

Apparently one of the benefits of telling people where you are is also a way of letting them know that your diet is over for the foreseeable future. I think I have my first comment ready for a friend of mine on Facebook that reports their location there and, in effect, advertises for the hamburger king. It’ll read something like “I know the location of the nearest EMS vehicle so when your heart stops it should be able to get to ya pretty quickly!”

OK, so that was a bit overboard but you get the picture. Brands will have to consider just what the up AND downsides are of letting their followers tell about their engagement with the brand. People on social networks are just as adept at making fun of what people do as they are of giving an affirming “atta boy!” to their efforts (at least my friends are ;-) ).

So what might this deal look like?

Facebook is not directly charging McDonald’s to build the app; Facebook generally does not charge developers to build on its platform. But executives with knowledge say it was negotiated as part of a bigger media buy on Facebook, and McDonald’s will be the first marketer to take advantage of the service.

Facebook is taking its usual ‘high road’ approach and acting as if they would never do anything to make money other than get paid by advertisers for their advertising platform.

Yesterday, Kevin Colleran, director-national sales at Facebook, was asked about such a capability at Resource Interactive’s iCitizen Conference in Columbus, Ohio. “We’re still trying to figure out what our strategy is,” Mr. Colleran said. “When we launch, whatever our product in that space, we will figure it out.”

He also underscored that Facebook wouldn’t attempt to monetize geolocation capabilities in the near term. “We never launch a functionality with the intent of monetizing it,” he said. “The best case in point would be [advertisers] are frustrated. We will not allow them to buy an ad on mobile.”

Huh? What flavor Kool-Aid is being served at the Facebook mess hall these days?

Mr. Colleran noted that Facebook has the world’s largest mobile application, with more than 100 million users each day. “We don’t make a single dime off it,” he said. “And that is our intent.” Facebook, he said, is profitable because of the advertising on Facebook.com alone.

Ok, so maybe the real story here isn’t that Facebook is on the verge of rolling out geolocation options for its service but more that they are not looking to monetize anything about Facebook other than through its advertising offers. Maybe this kind of spin was cooked up by the same team that tells the world that Facebook is very concerned about user privacy. It’s just not very believable.

So are you excited to let your friends in Facebook know where you are at every minute of the day and then let brands piggy back on your activities for their benefit? Maybe next we’ll get brand clothing to wear at the brand places so we can then take brand pictures of ourselves using the brand’s stuff then posting it on branded Facebook updates.

Sounds brand grand! Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim: Facebook Social Plugins on 50,000 Sites Already

Facebook has its good and bad days. If we are talking about Facebook and privacy then it’s probably a bad day. In this case, we are talking about the rapid adoption of Facebook’s set of social plugins, in particular their “Like” button. According to Facebook they have hit the “50,000 sites served” mark with these new social media integration tools.

TechCrunch tells us some more

Facebook has just given us an idea of how quickly these widgets are being adopted: a week after f8, 50,000 websites now feature the Like button and the other new plugins.

75 of those websites were Facebook’s launch partners, which included sites like CNN and the New York Times — everyone else handled the integration on their own, which Facebook has made very straightforward (it generally just involves copy-and-pasting a few lines of code). This growth is important, because as more sites integrate these social widgets, Facebook will increasingly own social interaction across the web.

In classic Facebook fashion, the wizard of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, made the prediction there would be over 1 billlion “likes” in the first 24 hours of the service’s existence. I say classic fashion because it was such an outrageous claim and read as if there would be 1 billion hits of a like button there was need for Zuckerberg spin control as TC reported an update

A Facebook spokesman has clarified that Zuckerberg was referring to the number of impressions the Like button had, not how many times people clicked the Like button.

Spin is still the forefront of the Internet hype and hyperbole machine. Facebook does it better than anyone. With their predictions and then their “cat who ate the canary” looks when confronted with privacy matters, it gets ridiculous but guess what? We’re stuck with it because they are big and getting more powerful.

So do you “like” Facebook and their approach or are you just going to play along because there are no other options?
Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim: Newspaper Circulation Contines to Nosedive

The headline alone is nothing that will surprise people, especially those in the online marketing industry. In fact, watching the decline and fall of the newspaper industry is some kind of guilty pleasure that everyone seems to relish. Since there are jobs and things at stake maybe that’s not such a good position to take but it is what it is, as they say.

The continued circulation declines however, are real news in the sense that it truly signifies the shift in how people get their information these days. Because of our ‘go-go’ lifestyle most people can’t be bothered with the print version of a newspaper. Commutes in cars make it harder to read a paper (notice I didn’t say impossible since there are still morons that think driving and reading the paper is simply multi-tasking). There is less time in the morning to ‘relax’ while reading the paper. Life is just different. Maybe not better but certainly different.

The Audit Bureau of Circulation’s latest figures confirms this change as 10 of the top 25 newspapers experienced a decline of more than 10% in the six months ending March 31, 2010. The Wall Street Journal reports

Newspaper circulation has been ebbing slowly for decades, but the pace has picked up of late, as more readers turn to a range of digital media such as the Web, smartphones and the iPad. Some publishers also have drastically curtailed the distribution of their papers, while others have abandoned print partially or altogether for the Internet.

Among the country’s largest papers, the sharpest drops were at the San Francisco Chronicle, owned by Hearst Corp., where circulation fell nearly 23%, and the Dallas Morning News, owned by A.H. Belo Corp. Its circulation declined 21%.

The one bright spot is actually the Wall Street Journal itself as it retains the top circulation spot it took last year from USA Today. Just that fact alone is enough to make one think. The Wall Street Journal is read by the business community and in particular business leadership. That leadership tends to be older because of experience levels. As a result, when will that group finally “age out” and the Journal’s numbers will also slide as a result of demographics more than anything else?

The plight of USA Today is actually tied to business as well. It is tied to the economy though not because the readers are the business barons like the WSJ but rather the road warrior that gets their USA Today in the hotels and motels of the workweek business traveler. Business travel is down so the USA Today circulation is down as well. Down a whopping 14%.

So the discussion turns to paywalls and what is next for the newspaper industries. These declines have been piling up for the last three six month periods. Obviously, this is not a sustainable path.

Will Rupert Murdoch’s cry for paid content be heard? Does anyone take into account that the success of the Wall Street Journal is that business people require the information it gives AND have the resources to keep paying for the information? WSJ readers are nothing like the common reader. Also, if you live in a high-tech region like San Francisco wouldn’t it make sense that the decline in circulation will be accelerated?

Honestly, these results don’t uncover anything we haven’t known for a while now. What is becoming evident though is that time is truly running out for newspapers to “you know what” or get off the pot. If they continue on this path the end is already known. Does anyone really want to see that ending? I know I don’t.
Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim