Marketing Pilgrim

Forrester Research is holding its own conference down in Orlando and has just revealed its predictions for the growth of online advertising. The bottom line is that social media and mobile will be the hottest, but just about everything will see an upward trend.

While the recession may be hurting the search engines’ revenues, it’s apparently not having an affect on the spending habits of search marketers.

According to the latest UK Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report from Econsultancy, search marketers plan to increase their spending this year.

Highlights include:

• 55% of UK search marketers plan to increase their SEO spending this year.
• 45% plan to increase their paid search budgets
• 49% plan to include Twitter in their marketing efforts–up from 3% last year–and 65% are including Facebook.
• 48% are seeing an increase in ROI from their SEO campaigns (compared to 6% that have seen a decline) and for paid search, 43% have seen an increase (versus 15% that have seen a decline).

Microsoft reported its first ever year-over-year quarterly drop in revenue, in its entire 30-year history!

I’ll let that sink in for a second.

In its three decades of existence, Microsoft had never before seen a year-over-year quarterly drop, so if you needed a sign of just how bad this recession is, this is it!

Here are the official numbers:

…revenue of $13.65 billion for the third quarter ended March 31, 2009, a 6% decline from the same period of the prior year. Operating income, net income and diluted earnings per share for the quarter were $4.44 billion, $2.98 billion and $0.33 per share, which represented an increase of 3% and declines of 32% and 30%, respectively, when compared with the prior year period.

Based on a post for the General Counsel for Facebook, Ted Ullyot, the results for the Facebook vote are in and the new rules / terms of service are in. Or are they?

As I read the post my greatest question was did they actually get 30% of their active users to vote so the following statement in a post from Facebook’s Grand High Poobah, Mark Zuckerberg, would play out

We encourage you to participate and make your voice heard. For this vote and any future one, the results will be binding if at least 30 percent of active Facebook users at the time that the vote was announced participate. An active user is someone who has logged in to the site in the past 30 days.

The new Yahoo story continues to evolve on what seems a daily basis. No longer a business fantasy land of oddball executive titles (Chief Yahoo) and “if it feels good do it” business planning, TechCrunch reports that Yahoo has quietly announced it is shuttering GeoCities by the end of this year.

Yahoo purchased the free hosting service during the last century (I’ve been wanting to write that for some reason) for $2.87 billion. That was 1999 dollars. If you follow the comment stream at TechCrunch there is a fair amount of nostalgia surrounding this end of an era. The end of an era, however, may be the start of another for Yahoo. Rather than letting the service eat up resources at a time where saving money is as important as generating it, Yahoo is making real world business decisions based on, gulp, reality. For a dose of facts and figures to make a business decision on these certainly helped the Yahoo team pull the plug.

Google has updated your smartphone shopping experience by adding Google Product Search results for iPhone and Android users.

…when you type a product query on Google.com in your iPhone or Android browser, you’ll get Google Product Search results nicely formatted for your phone. You can see online ratings, reviews, prices, and product details if you’re out and about, or just do some mobile web surfing from your couch.

Just in case the simplicity of this announcement escapes you, Rob here, will explain how it works:

Well, thanks Rob! But I have a question for you? Why did you search “bluetooth headset” and not the actual model you had picked up in the store? What’s that you say? Because when you search for an actual product model, say “motorola h710,” from your iPhone, NO product search results show up?