Marketing Pilgrim

Microsoft has announced the private beta launch of Microsoft Vine, a web tool designed to keep family and friends in contact with each other.

Now, before you start screaming “Twitter ripoff,” take a close look at what Microsoft Vine is trying to be:

Send and receive alerts. Organize people into groups – the sports team you coach, people who live nearby, family far away, special friends, and emergency contacts…Check in safe and well to let your family know you are okay, let trusted neighbors know you’re headed out of town, keep people informed of situations that matter, or share general information like the team practice schedule for the week.

In a report from eMarketer there is a mixed bag of news for online sales from Q1. The study that was done by Forrester Research and Shop.org shows an overall increase in online sales of 11%. Nice number for sure considering the daily doom and gloom that seems to dominate the economic news of most days.

Digging into the findings just a bit reveals how that increase is not something that appears to be felt across the board. Overall, 58% of those using the online sales channel experienced an increase in sales. When you put it that way it seems to say that the increase may be more a result of some areas showing bigger increases which were offset other poor performers. The chart below reveals the weak spot.

Yesterday we looked at the SEC and its involvement in the world of social media. The impact of even the thought of raising a big government agency’s eyebrow in this environment is enough to send the most daring social media companies to the corner for a time out to think about what they are doing.

Yesterday, Reuters reported that another of the US government’s big boys, the FTC (Federal Trade Commission), fired a warning shot across the bow of Internet companies regarding proper collection and use of data for advertising.

FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said that

Companies that track consumer behavior on the Web for targeted advertising without proper consent are near their “last chance” to self-regulate.

“People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.”

Ten years ago the above statement made it to #11 on The Cluetrain Manifesto‘s list of 95 theses. Read the thesis again and then consider the “networked markets” that existed in 1999. There was no Facebook, no MySpace, no Digg, no Yelp, no TripAdvisor, and certainly no Twitter. Instead, customers were connecting with, and supporting, each other using newsgroups, forums, email newsletters, and–barely–blogs.

As you can probably tell, I’ve always been kind of partial to Yahoo walking away from Microsoft’s overtures. I’ve seen what Microsoft has done so far online and despite the fact that their combined traffic might be the only entity that could keep Google from a total monopoly on the search market, I’m not convinced the alternative is much better for Yahoo. And now somebody else is there to back me up: Silicon Alley Insider.

The Insider’s Nicholas Carlson acknowledges that they’ve long said Yahoo should go for a Microsoft deal for three reasons:

• Like Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, we believe that combining Yahoo’s bidders with Microsoft bidders for the same search keywords would drive up cost-per-click.

By Peter Young

It seems Google is in a state of flux. Not a day goes by when there isn’t something new to play around with on some part of the Google playground. With many other channels seeing significant changes it hasn’t come as a surprise therefore that Google rolled out a number of improvements to the Keyword Tool interface. The previous options have been replaced with two columns, one for local search volume for the previous month and one for global search volume:

The newly added Local Search Volume column provides data “specific to your targeted country and language as well as your selection from the Match Type drop-down”, whilst the global monthly search volume provides “traffic in all countries and languages and is specific to your selection from the Match Type drop-down menu”.