Marketing Pilgrim

Don’t you just hate it when someone doesn’t know they’re dead? Lycos Europe insists that it’s feeling much better after spending the last two years in come back attempts, the clearance rack and, finally, utter oblivion. Yes, they think they’ll go for a walk now!

At least that’s what TechCrunch reports from Lycos execs. In addition to regaining the European rights to trademarks on “Lycos” and “Hotbot” (holy 1996, Batman!), Lycos is making a for European domination to rival a nineteenth-century tyrant.

Only, you know, a lot less popular than Napoleon.

Lycos CEO Jungwook Lim says, “Lycos continues to have a loyal user base and we expect this consolidation to help revitalize and strengthen our search businesses within Europe.” And Edward Noel, General Manager of Search and Business Development for Lycos, is in on the act, too:

As we rapidly approach the end of the second quarter of 2009 there is still news trickling in from what happened in Q1. As suspected, that news is not good. A study by TNS Media Intelligence was reported in today’s WSJ and ad spend for media including TV, print and online display ads fell 14% year to year to $30.8 billion. It is important to note that this number does NOT include online search ads or in store ads.

Based on that what are these numbers telling us? First, they are from the equivalent of a century ago but they are simply validation that things have been bad and all of the complaining may have some merit. In fact, to hear TNS’s senior vice president of research, Jon Swallen, put it “We are now in the record books with the worst quarter in a decade.”

Now this is a neat idea. Public relations firm MWW Group has launched a mobile app that lets you quickly read the top blogs in the areas of PR, marketing, and social media.

Called M.Insight, it’s basically an "install and forget" RSS reader that includes 54 blogs across 6 different categories–although you can add more blogs and categories, if you wish.

Watch this video for more details:

I’m impressed by this for two reasons. One, it’s a great little application that I’ll certainly use on my iPhone. Second, MWW has added their own news feed to the default, so they’re using the application to help promote their services. Smart!

PS. You’ll find Marketing Pilgrim’s feed, strangely enough, not in the "Marketing & Branding" category, but the "Advertising" one.

Despite the lack of publicly displayed information, I’ve always liked Facebook profiles for Google reputation management. I mean, just take a look at the number of times "Andy Beal" is mentioned on my limited public profile:

Coupled with your name in the Title tag, Facebook is pretty useful for occupying one of Google’s ten blue links–especially if you don’t already have a lot of positive content in the search results.

Well, Facebook is getting ready to allow users the ability to pick a username for their profile URL–as opposed to a randomly assigned series of numbers.

Just as Google is trying to secure friends in high places in the halls of Washington, DC it is hearing that its class action book settlement from October with various book publishing entities is getting the serious attention of anti-trust regulators. Good thing there are so many Googlers on the ground in the nation’s capital to try to douse this one, if they can. No one wants to be looked at as an evil big business these days trying to take advantage of free market opportunities. That’s bad for business.

According to the New York Times

The Justice Department has sent the requests, called civil investigative demands, to various parties, including Google, the Association of American Publishers, the Authors Guild and individual publishers, said Michael J. Boni, a partner at Boni & Zack, who represented the Authors Guild in negotiations with Google.

Surprise, surprise: already this week, we’ve seen Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz dinging new rival Bing in an interview with Fox Business Network. But apparently they’re not through. In an interview with the same network, Google CEO Eric Schmidt offers his own completely unbiased criticism of the minor upstart of a rival:

It’s not the first entry for Microsoft. They do this about once a year. From Bing’s perspective, they’ve got a bunch of new ideas and there are some things that are missing. We think search is about comprehensiveness, freshness, scale and size of what we do. It’s difficult for them to copy that.

click through to view video of full interview