YouTube.ca launched yesterday with a (ho hum) focus on Canada. Whooppee, funny Canadian cat tricks. Whooohoo, Avril Lavigne videos. Ooops, scratch that, copyrighted material. Whooohoo, 10 looooooooooooooooonnnnngggggggg minutes of watching ice melt from that cold place way up north.

Oh oh. Am I sounding too cynical?

Driving home last night, listening to the Toronto radio station ANATT (All News All The Time), I struggled to think how this could possibly be news? And I wondered what the business case was that could possibly warrant a Canadian YouTube site.

Office Depot’s announcement of new mobile marketing services caught my attention today. These new services include the launch of a mobile store locator, RSS feeds, text message coupons and offers, and mobile sweepstakes capabilities.

I doubt anyone’s getting exited about Office Depot RSS feeds on their mobile device and I’m not alone. According to Steve Levy, President of Market Research in Eastern Canada for IPSOS Reid, 27% of Canadian marketers agree that mobile marketing will be very important in the future with 9% indicating they are practicing it now.

This battle is a lot closer than most of you can imagine. I’m constantly hearing about how the Yellow Pages are dying and there’s no value in them. While most may say that I’m biased because of the number of years I spent in the industry, the same cannot be said for Google Analytics.

Google Analytics cannot lie, it has no biases and, thank goodness for the Yellow Pages, paints a much different picture than many so called experts. You just have to know what to look for.

Can a good search presence improve an offline marketing campaign’s results? You may be surprised to hear … ABSOLUTELY! Offline and search campaigns are actually very symbiotic in nature. See the proof abreviated in graphical form below, but also be sure to check out the full study.

The Proof:

Courtesy iProspect

The Cudos:
The study was commissioned by iProspect and was performed by Jupiter Research. It was titled iProspect Offline Channel Influence on Online Search Behavior Study. Check it out! Our industry needs more of these studies performed. Google, Yahoo, ermmm MSN … please step up!

Professionally, LinkedIn is my main social network. It provides for a more focused business networking environment than most social media sites. It’s a great tool, especially for finding people, references, job postings and business opportunities. Additional benefits I’ve discovered include; the ability to talk about your professional self, link to your other Google-friendly web content and customize your profile URL. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather a potential employer/client find my LinkedIn profile on Google, before any others of me!

This week, I’m taking a look at LinkedIn, by the numbers:

The Beginning:

Hot on the heels of a posting titled ‘Differentiate (Your Avatar) or Die’ by Michael (aka planetc1) over at Sphinn, and following the unique experince had recently by one of the ladies here in our office, I was prompted to create an avatar experiment and then test it. Essentially, she (our female staff member) changed her StumbleUpon avatar, and upon doing so, her friend count increased very quickly with virtually no effort.

Now, I’m sure many of you have theories about this, but it certainly caused many of us at SEP to chat and theorize in the office. After much debate, we hypothesized that:

I’ve had a few friends lately who aren’t sure about the value of social media marketing, so rather than debate the merits of social media verbally, I thought I’d save the time needed to argue it repeatedly, and do my best to compile my thoughts so I could merely direct others to this posting in the future. Below are what I believe to be the 7 benefits to engaging in social media. Keep in mind, different individuals will have different objectives, and therefore will look for different benefits. Here is a summary though:

Google and Yahoo didn’t have much of a presence at the CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment conference in San Francisco last week, but their startup competitors and much smaller rival AOL all did.

While Google and Yahoo have been pursuing mobile search and advertising, they’ve met resistance from mobile operators in the U.S. “Some are concerned about Google and Yahoo being stronger competitors, that they will become in effect the dumb pipe that the ISPs became,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst at Sterling Market Research and Opus Research. “I think that’s a valid fear. On a personal note, I just love that quote!

Google’s recent attempts to stomp out link selling increases the very problem Google tries to fight.

What’s Going On?

After a year long FUD campaign Google has fired off two rounds at sites it suspects of selling links.

It punishes those sites by lowering their Toolbar PageRank, a more or less fake version of Google’s calculated real PageRank. (see also Matt Cutts on PageRank).

Lowering that Toolbar PageRank has no effect on a site’s ranking and thus traffic. But as paid links are priced at PageRank, lowering that visible PageRank lowers the amount of money a site owner can make from selling links.

Its true! The image below is a link to a web site! Its not to be clicked on though … its an offline link that needs to be photographed from a mobile device to be activated. In this case, it may reside on a billboard, a poster on a telephone pole, an ad in a men’s washroom, or a tile on a train station floor. But make no mistake … it is a link to a website!