MarketingInsideOut.com

Via Flickr.

As part of a partnership announced Wednesday, Google will dispense driving directions at thousands of gas pumps across the US beginning next month.

It’s a brilliant idea when you think about it. The gas station is the one place you always stop for maps and directions. And men, in particular, are notorious for being unwilling to ask for directions (my husband always makes me go in and that’s if I can get him to admit he’s lost). But give a guy some kind of computer device to play with, and he’ll love it.

The pumps, made by Gilbarco Veeder-Root, include an Internet connection and will display Google’s mapping service on a small screen. The initial rollout is fairly small at only 3,500 pumps, and the Google service will be limited, at least initially. Using the pump’s touch pad, drivers will be able to choose a category, like restaurants, bars, hotels,landmarks,etc. After the driver selects a destination, the pump will print out directions. Retailers will choose the listings.

Unlike most of Google’s services, this one won’t include ads Google sells (at least not now). However, participating service stations will be able to make some money from area merchants that want to offer coupons on the service. Google is letting the station owners work with local retailers to set up coupons that drivers can print out along with the directions.

After weeks of speculation, Facebook’s new ad system, dubbed Facebook Ads, was revealed Tuesday. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook’s new technology represents a new era in which commercials are replaced by messages planted in online conversations between friends. Blockbuster, CBS, Sony Pictures, Coca-Cola, Fandango, eBay and Verizon are among the initial partners.

The three-pronged effort launches tonight and will basically allow companies to create their own Facebook pages, which can serve as the spring board for viral apps, and then allow users to add company information and updates to their own profiles and mini feeds. Then there’s an ad system for advertisers and an interface to gather insights into people’s activity on Facebook that marketers care about.

Insights that come from the social network’s members who reveal their purchases, eBay product postings, and other things they’ve done on some 40 Web sites (so far) off-Facebook and have them appear on their profiles. That ultimately can provide advertisers with information to target ads to just the people most likely to be interested.

According to the new release:

Advertising messages will gain distribution through what Facebook has termed the “social graph,” the network of real connections through which people communicate and share information. When people engage with a business’ Facebook Page, that action will spread information about that business through the social graph.

This enables advertisers to deliver more tailored and relevant ads to Facebook users that now include information from their friends so they can make more informed decisions.

Word of mouth (personal referrals) is by far the most persuasive element in product or service selection. Face it, we’re herd animals, and even the skeptics often act on the recommendations of those they know and trust. This is why the Facebook platform could be revolutionary. It could potentially allow marketers to harness this one-to-one trusted recommendation engine.

So the appeal of using people who like a product as brand ambassadors is obvious, but I wonder if there will be diminishing returns if Facebook members’ news feeds end up chock full of paid placements and “friends” feel like shills. The devil will be in the details of how this all actually works.

I keep thinking that if I could just get more organized…get ahead of things a bit, I would have all the information I need and everything would be significantly easier.

My desk is overflowing even though I recently cleaned it. My desktop background is hidden behind an army of icons, digital post-its, shortcuts, gadgets and widgets even though I’ve deleted about 50% of them. This morning I had 250 new emails and that doesn’t include the ones that were designated as junk mail. Plus there’s about 50 I still need to answer from last week. I’ve set up news feeds to stay up to date and then aggregated my thousands of news feeds into one tidy package. I touch my snail mail only once and try to handle each piece of paper that comes across my desk efficiently.

I’ve done the things organizers suggest. But there’s still so much. So many gaps. So much I need and want to know and learn. And I keep thinking that if I can just find that one piece of information, that the dozens of ideas adrift in my brain would gel and kick start me into a feverish state of productivity and creativity. But it’s like the more I read and research, the less I know, and the more I feel I need to read and research. The sheer amount of information we have at our fingertips is exhilarating and paralyzing. And exhausting.

Which led me to a question about the rate of information growth compared to the past. In researching the subject, I typed “information overload” in Google and it showed over 2.6 million results. That alone was intimidating. But I clicked on a few and while looking around, I read about the striking difference between the industrial economy of the past and its issues of scarcity (think oil) and the digital economy and its glut of data. Consider these stats:

• A typical weekday issue of the New York Times contains more information than a 17th century individual would have read in a lifetime.
• In the last 30 years we have produced more information than in the previous 5,000.
• The amount of recorded scientific knowledge is doubling approximately every fifteen years.
• There is enough scientific information written every year to keep a person busy reading day and night for 460 years.
• Over 1,000 books are published around the world every day.
• Every day there are 7 million new documents published on the Web, where there are already over 550 billion.
• The world produces between one and two exabytes of unique content per year, which is roughly 250 megabytes for every man, woman, and child on earth. (I had to look it up…an exabyte = 1000⁶ )

I found one stat that said the “produced” information is increasing at a rate of 30% per year, and it doesn’t show any sign of slowing down. If that stat is true, then 3 1/3 years from now there will be double what there is now. Yikes! How do we cope? I typed into Google, “how to deal with information overload?” and got over 1.7 million results. I think my brain has just froze. I need to reboot.

A few weeks ago in this post, I said I felt Dove and Unilever went too far with the Onslaught video. Good intentions aside, the hypocrisy was just a bit too much for me. I read several accounts of others who felt the same way. And tonight I ran across a a very visual example of the backlash.

This from Christine over at PSFK:

“Filmmaker Rye Clifton offers a response to the film, with a mash-up short of his own called “A Message from Unilever” (view it below). In it, he contrasts the contradictory messages put out by the corporation that owns both Dove and Axe, the latter known for its ads featuring scantily clad sexpots (whose parents apparently didn’t talk to their daughters before the beauty industry did) vying for the attention of horny Axe-sprayed men.”

The message here…Talk to your daughter before Unilever does.