Articles and posts which caught my attention during the week of August 6-10, 2012 covering such topics as Yahoo!, social media, marketing technology, agile marketing, A/B testing and analytics …
Monday
- The speculation over the direction Yahoo! will take under the leadership of Marissa Mayer continues. On Marketing Pilgrim, Frank Reed has some ideas, and some questions, about where the service is headed: Are Yahoo Local Search Changes Already the Influence of Mayer?
- Southwest Airlines’ recent “LUV2LIKE” campaign caused a lot of customers a lot of problems. I looked to book a flight soon after the deal was announced, but they didn’t have any deals going where I wanted to go so I didn’t experience the problems some others did. It also put egg on the face of a brand which normally enjoys a great online reputation. Still, they put their best foot forward and made a great effort to make things right.
- Eileen Brown has the story on ZDNet: Southwest Airlines LUV2LIKE promotion multi-charged users after error
- Rebecca Murtagh took a look at the situation and has some lessons to be learned from it on her blog: Southwest Airlines Website #Fails Amidst Facebook Flash Sale – A Teaching Moment
Tuesday
- Sorry … I was traveling most of the day and didn’t get caught up with my news feeds until Wednesday …
Wednesday
- Mistakes happen. We’re all imperfect people working with and for other imperfect people. Mistakes are made (as exampled by Southwest above). Amber Naslund has some interesting thoughts on social media mistakes and how others react to them on the Sidera Works Blog: The Weaponization of the Social Web And How To Deal With It
- I recently did a post about how to implement the rel=author tag on web sites running the Thesis Theme in WordPress. Thomas Ballentyne has some more information on this topic on his Pest Control Marketing & Such Blog: Completing my Google Authorship
- On the Chief Marketing Technologist Blog, Scott Brinker shares some thoughts on how customers view brands online in various places. To them, it’s all one place … but to many marketers, there are several places. In meetings, I’ve often brought up the need for an overarching strategy to unify the story as much as possible. Scott recommends: Mr./Ms. CMO — tear down these walls!
- I love that my current team relies on real numbers and data to make better decisions. On Marketing Pilgrim, Frank Reed shows some eMarketer data indicating that many marketers don’t use the data available to them. Perhaps it’s because they don’t know how to use it or how to glean valuable information from it. Either way, it’s something that has to change or they will be left behind: Marketers and Analytics Find It Hard to Get Along
Thursday
- On the Google Webmaster Central Blog, Susan Moskwa shares some information about how to better handle duplicate content issues when doing multivariate testing: Website testing & Google search
Friday
- In another Chief Marketing Technologist piece, Scott Brinker talks up the concept of “Agile Marketing” – which is a natural extension of working in the online world: Google brings agile to agencies with “Agile Creativity” vision
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Thanks for the agenda! I appreciate the info.