Marketing Pilgrim

Mozilla and its popular Firefox browser are familiar to most of the tech / internet marketing / geek world and for good reason. While 67% of the world uses Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser mainly because they don’t know there are other options, Mozilla continues to carve out a strong position in the market. The trouble with that position is that 88% of the revenue the Mozilla Foundation generates is from Google. Meanwhile, Google’s Chrome browser, while only having a 1% market share, is waiting in the wings for Google’s current arrangement with Mozilla to expire in 2011.

Google is not not not building a social network. Really. They’re not. They’re just adding features to every product ever made to enable you to communicate and otherwise share information among your peer group and store all your information in a centralized place. That’s soooo not a social network, so I don’t need anybody telling me about how Google Reader’s new comment feature shows that they’re a social network.

So let’s see. Way back in December 2007, Google Reader add the socially option to share items from your RSS feeds with anyone in your Gmail contact list. These people are your so-called “friends,” though most of them you probably haven’t heard from in two years. Last May they premiered the ability to add a note to items you were sharing and share items from anywhere on the Internet. In August, they finally let us better control what friends we shared with.

eBay has been busy announcing changes and fueling speculation around others. According to the WSJ the online marketplace is going back to its roots as an “internet flea market” , as well as moving away from the retail model that Amazon owns and concentrating more on PayPal. Lots of stuff going on during the post Meg Whitman era, huh?

Along with all of this the rumor mill firing up again about what will happen to Skype. BusinessWeek reports that there was more focus than usual at the annual meeting yesterday on Skype’s place in the eBay fold. Considering the fact that just about everything else is up in the air other than the original core business model this is no surprise. It is not the first time that there has been talk about the possible sale of Skype either.

You’re going to hate me.

Hate me, because I managed to get a GrandCentral account before Google acquired the company and stopped issuing new accounts.

Hate me, because as of today, existing GrandCentral customers will be the first to get their hands on the newly launching Google Voice service!

There’s a host of new features being announced, but the one I am most excited about is Voicemail Transcripts. The main reason I use GrandCentral is that all voicemails are emailed to me as audio files that I can play within my browser. Now, I won’t even have to play them because Google will transcribe the audio message for me!

Other new features include:

• Send, receive, and store SMS
• Call US numbers for free

We can all probably agree that as we work our way through this current economic situation we are going to see more scams and attempted scams than ever. Everyone is looking to make a buck and what better way than to either use good old fashioned extortion or play on the fears of those suffering the most. Ahh, isn’t it a beautiful time we live in?

In 2008 the practice of brandjacking picked up the pace and we can only imagine that it will not slow down anytime soon. Clickz covers a report that was done by MarkMonitor and released earlier this week. Leading the pack is that time honored practice of cybersquatting. While this is less likely to happen with bigger brands because of their legal clout and prowess it must be becoming more popular across the board.

A study published recently by Conductor, Inc. and reported in MediaPost today gives some interesting insights into the world of big business and organic search. It seems as if they either haven’t been introduced completely or they simply don’t get along.

The report can be highlighted by this finding alone: Fortune 500 companies spend $51 million per day in aggregate on 88,792 keywords–yet only 20.82% rank in the top 100 of natural search results.

The company did a similar study in November of 2008 but looked at a much smaller subset of keywords. The findings were broken out based on company sector using the NAICS (North American Industry Classification System). While the findings of the report spoke to the overall lack of real success for these biggest of the big firms there were some winners including MGM Mirage (accommodations & food services); Whirlpool (manufacturing); Viacom (information); Amazon (retail trade) and IBM (professional, scientific & technical services).