Marketing Biz: Know When To Hold ‘Em, Know When To Fold ‘Em

The week in marketing was a bit like a game of poker or chicken. Companies are playing their cards and seeing who will blink first.

Instagram cut off support for Twitter Cards. Facebook is negotiating with Microsoft for Atlas. Raven Tools decided to drop features to comply with Google AdWord API terms and conditions. Who will pick up the flush on the river? Time will tell.

This is … Marketing Biz.

Instagram and Twitter: The New Social Media Frenemies

Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s CEO, said in a statement, at LeWeb technology conference, that the company turned off support for Twitter cards to drive Twitter users to Instagram’s own website. Systrom explained that Instagram only supported Twitter cards because it had a minimal Web presence. Today, with over 100 million users, the company wants even more direct traffic from Twitter. This may not be the best experience for Twitter users, but it is the best experience for Instagram, and Systrom is not shy to admit it.

I’m not quite sure the timeline matches up with the idea that Instagram was small when it supported Twitter Cards. Instead, why don’t we just admit that Instagram doesn’t want to pipe rich content into a competitor’s platform for free.

Facebook And Microsoft Are Working On A Deal, And It Could Change Everything About Advertising

According to several industry sources, Facebook is in negotiations with Microsoft to buy Atlas Solutions, the ad-serving product Microsoft acquired when it bought aQuantive for $6 billion in 2007.

Maybe not everything but the acquisition of Atlas by Facebook would create a true competitor to Google’s Display properties. Given the success of the Facebook Exchange this intuitively makes sense for Facebook.

comScore Announces Beta Release of Media Metrix® Multi-Platform, Providing a Unified View of Web, Smartphone and Tablet Audiences

Building on Media Metrix, Mobile Metrix and Video Metrix from comScore’s Audience Analytics suite, this revolutionary product offers unduplicated accounting of audience size and demographics that reflects today’s multi-platform digital media environment, which includes websites, apps and video content accessed from multiple devices.

I’m not the biggest fan of comScore data. It’s frequently wrong, but wrong consistently and in the same way. So while I might not think the numbers comScore presents are exactly right, having this new combined view overtime will allow marketers to benchmark and see trends over the long haul. That’s a good thing.

New Startup Informly Brings Big Data to Small Business

“Dashboards have been around for a long time and they all promote the same message which is that small business owners are spending too much time in various systems understanding their data. But through my research and 6 years working directly with small business owners, I’ve found this is often not the case. Many small business owners wouldn’t understand much of a typical website analytics report. The issue isn’t just that there are a lot of systems to log into, it’s that the reports themselves are too complex and small business owners don’t have the time to learn each system’s reports. The data doesn’t just have to be centralised, it has to be simplified.”

The last sentence here is crucial. It’s not that small businesses want a centralized dashboard, they need it to be simplified as well. I’ll be interested in seeing if following the principles of the Paradox of Choice will win people over.

Announcing Our Acquisition of GetListed & Plans to Help Local Marketers & SEOs

Ladies and Gentlemen, it has been a tremendously exciting year here at SEOmoz. While our burgeoning engineering team is toiling away on some amazing new stuff, we’ve been busy plotting the future of Moz. Today, I’m excited to announce we’ve taken one big step toward that goal with the acquisition of GetListed, and the addition of David Mihm to the SEOmoz team.

Speaking of small businesses, it looks like SEOmoz is gearing up to tackle this market as well with the acquisition of GetListed. Keep an eye on SEOmoz as they look to become a business toolset for marketers of any stripe.

Raven to drop rankings, other scraped data on Jan. 2

Raven has decided to remove unauthorized Google data from our platform. As of 5 p.m. PST (GMT-8) on Jan. 2, 2013, we will no longer offer Google rankings and are eliminating our SERP Tracker tool in its entirety. Also, we will remove all data provided to us by SEMRush. You have until then to include any of that data in your reports.

Google is cracking down on compliance causing Raven Tools to drop their rank tracking and scraped data collection. The result is the retention of their Google AdWords API access and a direction, similar to SEOmoz, in offering a suite of services beyond traditional SEO.

Evernote Business Is Here. Start Building Your Team’s Knowledge Today.

When a user joins Evernote Business, they’ll be able to create Business Notebooks. Anything placed into a Business Notebook benefits the entire company. It’s easier to share Business Notebooks with fellow employees, Business Notebooks can be published to the Business Library (more on that below) and these notebooks can be shared or modified by administrators.

I never got into Evernote but I know lots of people swear by it. Evernote Business seems like a clever way to create business libraries for a host of different document types. This is hugely important since knowledge workers spent far too much time simply locating content.

AOL Eliminates CMO Position in Another Corporate Restructuring

The move comes as the company looks to decentralize marketing and push more consumer and B-to-B marketing dollars into individual digital publications and products at the company, such as Huffington Post, TechCrunch and the Advertising.com Group.

I don’t know if I’m impressed or depressed by this move. On the one hand it shows a lack of strategic certainty. On the other even if that’s the case they were willing to make the decision and move on it rather than equivocate. In short, they made a wrong turn and admitted as much. That’s good but … you can’t do that as frequently as AOL is doing and get to where you want to go.

Facebook opens mobile Messenger app to non-users in play for ubiquity

Facebook today announced that it would begin allowing non-Facebook users to use its standalone Messenger app on Android to send messages to the contacts in their phonebook who are on Facebook or also use Messenger.

This is a clever way for Facebook to try to acquire even more mobile adoption and usage, as well as prevent any potential migration to Google+, which has the superior mobile product at this point.

ClearStory Data raises $9M and might actually make data your friend

ClearStory Data has raised $9 million from from KPCB, Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures in an attempt to plant its stake in the world next-generation analytics platforms. Big data is presenting a big challenge for business users, and they need help making sense of it.

Data analytics companies are starting to be the equivalent to Starbucks, there’s one on every other corner. ClearStory looks interesting, but so do a host of others. In the end, it’ll be a race and UX and marketing will be the primary drivers for success.

Prismatic Gets $15M To Attack The Impossible Problem Of Bringing You Relevant News

Prismatic’s technology works by crawling Facebook, Twitter and the web (“anything with a URL”) to find news stories. It then uses machine learning to categorize them by Topic and Publication. Prismatic users follow these Topics and Publications, as well as Individuals and the algorithm then uses these preferences and user-activity signals to present a relevant Newsfeed.

I’ve tried nearly every one of these services and agree that it’s pretty much impossible. (It’s why I like Newsle instead.) Tell me what news aggregators you’re using and why you like them.

And Then …

Searchmetrics expands search analytics software to take in an additional 47 countries

Taggstar launches new image analytics dashboard for publishers