Marketing Pilgrim Published: "MP Welcomes New Sponsor: Full Sail University" plus 4 more

MP Welcomes New Sponsor: Full Sail University
Missouri Says "No Friends For You!" To Teachers
Google's Apparent Patent Swing and a Miss
Nielsen Wants to Change the Way We Measure Facebook Success
Google+ Hits 25 Million Visitors

MP Welcomes New Sponsor: Full Sail University

Posted: 04 Aug 2011 06:19 AM PDT

Our Channels program has been running for a few short months now and it continues to attract some of the best advertisers around.

Today we get to announce the addition of Full Sail University to our Channels program. They will be sponsoring our Social Channel.

As with all of our sponsors we encourage our readers to please visit them and see what they have to offer you, the best readers in the Internet and social media marketing world.

Thank you again to Full Sail University as well as all of our sponsors and advertisers! We couldn't do this without you!

Marketing Pilgrim's Social Channel is proudly sponsored by Full Sail University, where you can earn your Masters of Science Degree in Internet Marketing in less than 2 years. Visit FullSail.edu for more information.

INTERESTED IN HOW YOUR BUSINESS CAN GET IN FRONT OF A GREAT AUDIENCE? CONTACT US TODAY ABOUT SPONSORSHIP AND ADVERTISING OPPORTUNITIES.

Missouri Says "No Friends For You!" To Teachers

Posted: 04 Aug 2011 06:04 AM PDT

As a father I have often wondered about social media students and teachers. I have assurances from my Facebook using child that just the idea of being friends on Facebook with a teacher is weird. A good sign in my opinion but at least one state doesn't trust their citizens as a whole to come to the same conclusion.

In fact, to safeguard against any social media misdoings between students and teachers, Missouri has enacted a law saying that a social media relationship between teacher and student is illegal.

msnbc reports

Missouri has passed a law making it illegal for state teachers to friend their students on Facebook.
Governor Jay Nixon signed Missouri State Bill 54, which bans students and teachers from communicating and being "friends" on the social networking site. The law was created to prevent inappropriate relationships between children and teachers.
"Teachers cannot establish, maintain or use a work-related website unless it is available to school administrators and the child's legal custodian, physical custodian or legal guardian," the law states. "Teachers also cannot have a non work-related website that allows exclusive access with a current or former student."

This kind of restriction is the kind that will draw fire from every side of the freedom of speech argument. Here is the reaction from one teacher in Missouri as reported by the Kansas City Star

Randy Turner, an eighth-grade English teacher and prominent blogger from Joplin, Mo., said teachers communicate with students through internet sites because that's the venue students are most comfortable using.
"Right now, Facebook is the way they communicate," Turner said of his students.
Sometimes those communications might be public posts about class work or clubs, he said, but other times students may have specific questions about homework, grades or problems with other students — issues better suited to a private conversation.
"If you have a student who's having a problem in a particular class, they don't want to tell the whole world they're having a problem," Turner explained.
Turner, who frequently writes about education issues on his blog, accused the legislation of "targeting classroom teachers."
In practice, he said, the bill probably would confuse teachers about what is and isn't allowable online conduct and stifle legitimate and valuable conversations with students.

As for me, I am not a big supporter of laws intended to enforce what I see as a common sense issue but, at the same time, we live in very different times than just a mere 10 years ago.

Where do you stand on the idea of having the government legislate matters such as these? How could rulings like this impact the use of social media for marketers? Is there the possibility that marketing itself could be deemed as an inappropriate contact with certain groups?

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Google's Apparent Patent Swing and a Miss

Posted: 04 Aug 2011 04:46 AM PDT

If part of a company's game plan to defend against a perceived wrong doing against them involves firing off allegations, one would guess that those said allegations should be bulletproof, right?

Maybe Google's SVP and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond should have done a little more homework before he accused some big names of playing patent pranks on the search company. Here's the gist of his claim from the Google blog

But Android's success has yielded something else: a hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents.
They're doing this by banding together to acquire Novell's old patents (the "CPTN" group including Microsoft and Apple) and Nortel's old patents (the "Rockstar" group including Microsoft and Apple), to make sure Google didn't get them; seeking $15 licensing fees for every Android device; attempting to make it more expensive for phone manufacturers to license Android (which we provide free of charge) than Windows Phone 7; and even suing Barnes & Noble, HTC, Motorola, and Samsung. Patents were meant to encourage innovation, but lately they are being used as a weapon to stop it.

OK, so Google feels like it's getting unfairly beat up in this process. It's not like they don't play this game themselves with the recent purchase of patents from IBM. Drummond's claim, however, goes into an area where he says the competition has done some shady stuff which will result in some regulatory scrutiny.

This anti-competitive strategy is also escalating the cost of patents way beyond what they're really worth. The winning $4.5 billion for Nortel's patent portfolio was nearly five times larger than the pre-auction estimate of $1 billion. Fortunately, the law frowns on the accumulation of dubious patents for anti-competitive means — which means these deals are likely to draw regulatory scrutiny, and this patent bubble will pop.

So Google cries foul. Why not I suppose? Everyone seems to be taking shots at them these days.

Trouble is that the following salvo has been fired back by Microsoft. Rather than go the full blown blog post route, however, Microsoft decided to microblog instead. The following two tweets show just how powerful 140 characters or less can be. Or, in other words, speak softly and carry a big tweet.

First from Microsoft's general counsel, Brad Smith.

Next from Frank X. Shaw who leads corporate communications for Microsoft

The URL in that tweet is an e-mail from Kent Walker, Google's very own SVP and general counsel. It's a bit hard to read but it essentially tells the story that Google turned down the opportunity to bid jointly with Microsoft.

Now, to be fair, the e-mail doesn't mention the Novell patents so, in fine lawyer fashion, Walker said something without saying something. Gotta figure though that Smith and Shaw checked in with each other and decided they could throw a haymaker at Google on this one.

So what's the net / net here? Google looks whiny and ill prepared. Microsoft, Apple and Oracle look like they are doing what others do in business but could very well feel the sting of a regulatory investigation into anti-competitive claims. In this current political environment it looks like no one is safe from that possibility at any time for any reason.

In the court of public opinion, however, it looks like Google is out in the cold here. If you were asked to go play with someone, say no to the offer, then complain that the someone still played without you, you look bad.

Oh and the extra cost of each Android device? Why don't you just eat it Google? You have the cash.

Nielsen Wants to Change the Way We Measure Facebook Success

Posted: 03 Aug 2011 01:45 PM PDT

Measuring success is one of those social media marketing sticking points that still has most people baffled. Traditional online metrics such as measuring click-throughs doesn't really give you the full picture because a lot of social media campaigns are about awareness, not action. In other words, they function more like TV commercials than banner ads. This is why TV ratings leader Nielsen is working on bringing "Gross Ratings Points" to Facebook.

As explained in an article published in the Wall Street Journal, Gross Ratings Points are a metric that measures reach — "that is the size of an audience—by the "frequency" with which the audience sees a brand."

Nielsen wants to use the same terminology used for print, TV and outdoor advertising and it sounds like good way to go. So good, that comScore and Facebook are both moving forward with tools designed to capture this same metric.

comScore announced today that they've purchased AdXpose and will combine that with their current tools to bring "game-changing" metrics to online advertising. They're taking the concept of GRP and going one better with what they call "Validated GRP." They define this as "a measure of impressions that were legitimately delivered to a user, in the right context, within the right frequency range, to the desired target."

It's a lot to digest, but comScore has an oddly creepy video on their blog post which explains it better than I can.

The honest truth is that most of us throw whatever we can at Facebook and hope for the best. We figure every new "like" is a potential new customer and hey, you can't not have a Facebook page, right? Maybe with this shift in metrics, we'll finally see if posting to Facebook is time well spent, or whether we should be putting our efforts elsewhere.

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Google+ Hits 25 Million Visitors

Posted: 03 Aug 2011 11:39 AM PDT

On July 24, Google+ had 25 million unique visitors making it the fastest growing website ever. As Reuters reports, they're pulling in an average of one million visitors a day with no end in sight.

Facebook took three years to get to that point, but as Reuters also points out, MySpace took only two years to reach that number and look where they are now. Faster isn't always better.

What's interesting about this monumental number is that I don't see any difference in the site than I did when I joined. Actually, it's worse. As of today, my entire Google+ stream, all the way to the bottom of the page is nothing but posts from the very informative and fun Darren Rowse of ProBlogger. Yes, he's a talkative guy, and granted I don't have a lot of people attached to my account, but I have to go back several weeks to see a range of posts from people.

Am I alone in this?

Google+ is using the power of their name to pull in the visitors but once they get there, how many of them are turning into users, let alone regular users? Personally, I still feel like something is missing. I don't feel compelled to post there and finding people to follow feels counter intuitive. Usually, I'm a happy and excited early adopter but in this case, it's just not happening.

On a random note, when I searched "millions of people" in order to find an image for this post. This came up: