The public offering of Facebook shares is being valued at 100 billion.

Facebook provides little actual value to its advertising partners at the moment with many complaining of high volume but little return. People are buying the shares because they hope the company will do well and figure out how to actually resolve this. Don’t buy shares on just hope.

They won’t figure it out any tome soon but they will make a lot of money while they float on the hope.

I asked an audience of 70 people at a show this morning who was using email marketing and 10 of them raised their hands. I asked the same audience about social media and half of the room raised their hands. I then asked who had made money from email marketing and about 6 people raised their hands. I asked about social media and 1 raised her hand.

Social media is great, I love it but that does not mean it will work as it currently is commercially and the public offering risks detonating the bomb that pops all the bubbles because there is so much hope.

The shares will probably go up but when the truth is out they will fall – I assume within the year.

Does technology like Twitter tell me what is going on or does it make what is going on?

I think it is a bit of both. The problem we have with free press is the abundance of agenda amongst the media moguls – because Twitter is a technology company however they hold no agenda other than to expand their user base.

But isn’t this the same agenda of a newspaper? Yes, but most newspapers have had an increasingly high cost base and as a result some have been chasing the margins by publishing anything that will increase the user base.

So, why haven’t the papers gone online to reduce costs?

They have but they still can’t compete because of the cost of journalism.

So what will happen? At the movement technology has auto-trust – what we read, we tend to believe.

In the future, just like with the newspapers this auto-trust we have for technology will be corrected by something beyond even Twitter.

We will believe it without any cause for doubt, we will share it with others and they too will believe.

Unlike twitter it will not be owned or controlled by anyone but it will have providers that each manage small roles within the framework, it will not be owned by any corporation but it will have the ability to distribute information to the masses quickly and efficiently.

Someone, somewhere is already building a version of it but doesn’t know it yet. They will stumble upon it by accident one evening and then share it with a friend.

Within days we will all be using it to discuss what is coming next.

Nice…

I just looked on Google to see why Vera isn’t in ITV and found nothing, I then looked on Twitter and found out why. Did I just use twitter as a social search engine? Think so…

Go to LinkedIn and search for someone – anyone will do! Take a look at the pics that come up and choose a blonde, a good looking girl from the list of profile pics and click through to her profile page, any profile will do so long as she is an attractive blonde.

Scroll down the page to the section “Viewers of this profile also viewed” and I guarantee that all 10 will be women and 8 will be blonde and 6 will be good looking.

Has LinkedIn turned into facemash?

Not that I would ever use it of course but will LinkedIn create a “rate this pic button” and drop it on to the page to shake things up a little? Go on LinkedIn, dare you!

About 2 weeks ago I received an update to my facebook page from a friend talking about how addicted she was to Pinterest. I then tried to download Pinterest that night to my iOS device but it said I already needed an account in order to get it working, so it would not work.

The next day I went to the Pinterest website to sign up but the site said I couldn’t – it did however say that my name would be added to a waiting list and I would be informed as and when I could join the service.

Since that moment I have been wanting to join, if for no other reason to see what all the fuss is about but I can’t and that is leaving me feeling ***** off!

As a digital marketeer I realise that this is clever marketing but could it work for all brands – Pinterest have apparently reached 10 Million U.S. monthly uniques already which is faster than any standalone site – EVER!

We call this the hockey stick moment and apparently it is all down to 18-34 year old upper income women from the American heartland which coincidentally describes friend perfectly.

Techcruch state that according to comScore, the average Pinterest user spends 98 minutes per month on the site. The only sites with more user time are Tumblr at 2.5 hours and Facebook with 7 hours.

What sparked the hockey stick moment for Pinterest? Is anyone here using it? If so, tell me what it is all about, please…

I browsed a LinkedIn profile yesterday and on the home page was an “infographic”- if you have heard of inforgraphics and are currently using them, great – if not, then you should take a look. If you are geeky or creative you will like them, a lot.

An Infographic is a graphical representation of information. When several infographics are then brought together on a single page the viewer can gain a good understanding of your information quickly and easily.

This might benefit a LinkedIn profile where you are trying to show information about yourself such as your age, number of clients you have, number of big deals you have completed, percentage of blue chip companies you have worked with and so on.

A website that gives some examples of good inforgraphics I found on the web last night is as follows:

http://dailyinfographic.com/

Please share back with me an examples of your own as I am now building a few and would like to see as many examples as possible.

D.M.W. Gledhill

I have often been asked to look at digital marketing strategies by managers/clients alike and it always interests me to see where these managers/clients have themselves started before asking me to get involved.

For example if you run a website that sells flooring do you:

A) Go straight to Google Keywords External Tool to see what keywords are the most popular then edit your website content accordingly hoping you will hit number 1 on page 1 and become a zillionaire.
B) Go to your existing customers and ask them what they searched for to find you in the hope that they can even remember that far back (one of my favourite customers has been using one of my companies for almost 10 years – whilst I can remember exactly how he found me, I doubt he can)
C) Examine your competitors websites for the keywords the are using then copy. (Cheat)
the list goes on…

Most marketing strategies need to start somewhere with some sort of intel that can help guide the decisions we live by.

Sometimes, I like to start at the end – pick my top 20 clients, clients who have for one reason or another already chosen to work with us, perhaps you will list yours by revenue or profit, brand name or general niceness – eitherway – choose your top 20 then send them to a company like Experian or MarketSafe and ask this company to profile them for you – it costs a few hundred pounds.

The resulting profile report nearly always reveals something to me about my customers that I did not previously know. The more information the better and with the information revolution well under way we will soon be able to generate client profile reports that we could only ever dream about before the likes of Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn came along.

For example, imagine knowing that 16 of the primary contacts within your top 20 client list have a passion for motor racing, live in London and have 2 kids under the ages of 12 and 18. Would your next event still be a beer swilling late night bash at Club Dizzy or would it be a family track day at Silverstone?

Food for thought isn’t it?

It looks like Facebook spotted Google+ coming over the mountain a while ago, sent out their trailfinders to see how the market would react to a float and are now making for the valley for the shootout at noon.

Who will win?

First lets look at who is fighting, is it Google+ and Facebook or is it Google and Facebook? Lets face it, if it is Google+ that looses its grip then Google will probably follow… so…

- Google has money (so now does facebook)
- Google has lots of users (so does facebook)
- Google is loved by people (so is facebook, if not more than google)
- People trust google (people trust Facebook more)

oh dear, this is not going so well is it…

Could we really see Google implode? How will we know who is winning? We could look at users , earnings etc… I think we should measure it in time – how much time do we spend on each platform. We only have so much time in our day, we only have so much time to spend duplicating everything – eventually one will have to give. Only time will tell.

It is however critical that Google+ continues to grow sharply, a jitter in its growth of users could suggest a peak.

D.M.W. Gledhill

When I got home on Friday night my wife told me that my daughter had somehow managed to transport our lawn from the garden to her bedroom on the soles of her new shoes but not to worry as she we had called someone to come and clean the carpet.

Phil arrived and started work on my daughters carpet straight away. He asked me in a general way what I did for a living and I replied that I was in “marketing” – he then asked me if I could build him a website on “Google” – straight off, no messing… I like Phil.

At first I must have appeared to be a little dim – did Phil know about Google+ Business Pages already, even though most of my peers are yet to understand it? After a short chat it struck me that Phil thought Google was the internet, not just a list of websites on the internet.

When I asked him about Facebook he told me not to worry as he had already done that and was number 1…

Phil considered Google to be the internet and Facebook to be something else.

What is Facebook if it is not the internet? Or is Phil just wrong?

I am a great believer in reading – I wasn’t always – in fact at school I really struggled with reading and so kept a certain distance from any book of any real depth. Naturally, over the years I learn’t to keep away from books all together.

Then I came across a book that changed all this – it was nothing too much to swallow but oddly enough it was about Shakespeare. I read it whilst on a biker holiday with a buddy.

When I got back home I popped into my nearest book shop and browsed for a few moments before settling on a book that looked excellent. I felt proud to be emerging from a book shop with a book that weighed more than my phone – I felt part of a community. It was great. Soon after I started reading this new book it viciously killed off any and all interest I had gained in reading with a single heavy blow. I could not stand it and quickly threw it on to my Jamie Oliver shelf along with a whole bunch of other books I have that I have never read – I felt I had been defeated at the first hurdle.

A few months later – I was given a book by a friend that I read which brought me back on beam – ever since then I have made a point of reading books that other people that I am somehow connected to recommend – my last read, the “Viral Loop – The Power of Pass It On” brought me to ecademy because it references ecademy as a key business network. I finished this about a week ago and I love ecademy.

What should I read next? I am up for absolutely anything.