Marketing Pilgrim

After managing a 46% profit increase in Q3, Google could only manage a meager 17% growth in Q4 2007 (compared to Q4 2006). Wall Street rewarded Google with a 7% after-close stock plunge.

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Google earned $1.21 billion, or $3.79 per share, during the final three months of 2007. That’s up 17 percent from net income of $1.03 billion, or $3.29 per share, in the same period a year earlier.

More Bad News

The number of people clicking on AdWords rose just 9%–which was less than analysts expected–mostly in part due to Google’s efforts to filter out what it calls “accidental” clicks.

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If Yahoo’s earnings were disappointing and the economy slowing, there’s a piece of bright news today. Google is announcing their earnings today. The word Forbes used to describe what to expect from Google stock is stellar growth. The number in the article is a 40% increase in net income. This despite Google losing a small slice of the search engine market share last month.

Yahoo’s profit fell 23% and they mentioned Google as a factor as their revenue freefalls.

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Every branding professional you’ll meet will tell you that you never ever refer to your brand as a verb. Phrases like “I Googled that” or “I Xeroxed this” are poison to the ears of those who understand trademark law.

Without getting into the intricacies of trademark law (which I don’t fully understand anyways), the short explanation is that you should only reference your trademark as an adjective. An example of a properly used trademark would be “Google™ Search Engine”.

With this in mind, I was a little surprised recently when going through my iPhone to find Google business partner Apple using Google as a verb.

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Wow, where did January go? It’ll be Spring before you know it!

In the meantime, enjoy these picks:

• Just what the blogosphere needed, yet another way to measure who has the biggest audience.
• VentureBeat has a summary of online advertising trends discussed at the recent AlwaysOn OnMedia NYC conference.
• Web-based chat service Meebo has announced a new API and an ad network.
• Search Engine Watch looks at how to use SEO for online reputation management. Important advice includes the need to build links to positive content.
• Congrats to Dan London who’s heading up self-publishing company Lulu efforts to bring search marketing to authors.

Now here’s a tidbit of info that might make Wall Street feel warm and fuzzy. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin made a pledge to each other–not sure if a ring exchange was involved or not–to stay together for twenty years.

According to an interview in Fortune magazine, the deal was struck back in August 2004–just prior to the company’s IPO. To add a little twist to the relationship, CEO Eric Schmidt is also in on the deal–oh good, I get to use “menage à trois” in a blog post!

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Over the last month I and others have written quite a bit about domain tasting and how registrars are taking advantage of the policy, allowing them to capture potential domain names that their customers are searching for.

ICANN describes domain tasting as “the use of the Add Grace Period to test the profitability of a domain name registration. The AGP is a five-day period following the initial registration of a domain name when the registration may be deleted and a credit can be issued to a registrar.”

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This Linky Goodness is near and dear to my heart, most especially because . . . it’s Wednesday.

• New York is at it again: NY Legislature Considers Law Aimed At Keeping Sex Offenders Off Social Networking Sites
• Are we really headed into a recession? Perhaps, though it’s not officially a “recession” until things have been bad for six months. But Wired thinks Google Looks Recession-Proof

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Earlier this month, Jerry Yang introduced Yahoo’s pending social-mail integration as “Yahoo Life” (though the company later clarified that the product was, in fact, nameless). But it looks like they’ll make sure the name, or something like unto it, goes to good use. Valleywag reports that Yahoo will launch a new “lifecasting” service called Yahoo Live.

According to Valleywag, Yahoo posted the following announcement on their intranet, Backyard:

Yahoo! Live is social TV, where you’re the star! Create your own social broadcasting experience. Start by broadcasting yourself from your webcam, invite your friends to chat with you, they’ll go live with you, and you’re all on candid camera!

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How about a round of applause for these news stories. They didn’t quite make it to their own blog post, but they get an honorable mention below:

• Video of TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington making some predictions about Yahoo’s future.
• I think I might send Jessica Bowman’s article on setting realistic expectations with reputation management to all new clients.
• Social shopping web site ThisNext just grabbed another $5 million in funding.
• Want to quickly build your own web widget? RWW demos a new service from SproutBuilder that does just that.
• Is Dell working on a Google Phone?

The fact that the WSJ and Facebook have just partnered on a new initiative to let Facebook users share their favorite news stories, surely demonstrates one of the following:

1. Facebook is now dominated by 30+ -year old WSJ reading types.
2. The WSJ is just desperate to attract some hip under 30-year old readers.
3. Facebook is just completely selling out.
4. Both companies are just desperate.

OK, so I’m teasing, but it really does just come across as a strange partnership. It’s almost as if both companies figured it would give each of them some buzz, so struck the deal without actually worrying if anyone would care to use it or not.

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One of the things that I happen to find the most annoying about Facebook–externally developed junk such as "Zombie biting" and "Sheep Throwing"–will soon grace the pages of MySpace accounts.

Just as we reported back in October, News Corp’s MySpace will launch its own external developer platform, in an effort to keep a step ahead of Facebook.

As part of the February 5 launch, it has also promoted MySpace business development executive Amit Kapur to a new role as chief operating officer…Developers can register for more information at http://developer.myspace.com beginning on Wednesday.

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It’s been a long time since I’ve linked to Valleywag–I figure there are only so many romance gossip stories our readers can take–but they’ve redeemed themselves with news that Google TV Ads has only managed to attract 200 clients.

During a PR pitch to New York ad agencies this week, Long Ellis of Google revealed the astonishingly low number.

While even Google Radio has about 1,600 advertisers, Google TV advertising currently counts around 200. Why so low? Don’t be fooled by the brand name. Google TV advertising isn’t much of an innovation yet.

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