Marketing Pilgrim

Just last week the earliest of the early reports claimed that Bing had made some impact in the search engine arms race. Those numbers were met with a fair amount of skepticism due to the timing etc. Now Mashable reports that Compete.com has released US traffic stats that shows Bing is making some progress in more than just search.

So after a month, where are we? We knew that Bing was growing, but the numbers being released tonight tell a tale of success, as Bing is now the 13th most visited site on the web.

How long has it been since we’ve heard about Technorati? When did you last visit the erstwhile-preeminent blog tracking site? And even then, didn’t you get the sense they were going downhill? While that may just be what happens to every media (or blog) sweetheart, Technorati has seen a decline. Many have attributed this to a lack of features, innovation, relevancy of results, etc.

But Technorati is fighting back. With Twitter. Launching today, Twittorati is Technorati’s latest effort to make us think they’re still relevant. The site aggregates the tweets of bloggers in the Technorati Top 100. (They don’t, however, explain why you’d want to do this. Too lazy to read their blogs?)

Twittorati integrates with both Twitter and Technorati, but there’s not a lot of crossover. For example, this pane of the right-most column of the site:

Okay, Google isn’t going to help your website visitors find their direction in life. But now the fastest-growing maps website is bringing directions to your website visitors—on your site. Google Maps unveils a new directions widget (okay, okay, Google calls them “gadgets.” Whatever.) you can embed on your site to add door-to-door driving directions for your potential customers.

Most of the time, websites rely on a static set of directions and maybe a street-level map graphic to help potential visitors to a brick-and-mortar location. And of course, a lot of locations require multiple sets of directions: “From I-85, coming from Durham,” “From I-85, coming from Greenville,” “From I-40 coming from Raleigh,” “From I-40 coming from Chapel Hill,” “From 147 coming from RTP,” “From 147 coming from downtown Durham.” And if you’re not local, you may have no idea which of those directions you should be taking. The gadget may be able to help visitors find your b&m location, especially if you’re relying on directions like those for now.

If you work for a smaller paper or you have a favorite local paper that you simply don’t want to see fade into the sunset this is OK news. I can’t honestly say that there is real good news. It’s about the newspaper business after all. TechCrunch reports that statistics gathered by the Inland Press Association show that overall the average drop in profits for the industry as a whole was 77.6%, So how do you find a bright spot in that kind of number? You look at who is floundering the least and go from there.

The sad thing is that even of the economy comes back strong at some point this century newspapers may not even see improvement because it’s the medium, not the economy, which is the biggest culprit in the agonizing demise of a once vibrant industry. The chart below shows just how bad things are for the newspaper industry and there is little hope for recovery.

One of the core messages in my book Radically Transparent came courtesy of Edelman data which demonstrated that consumers overwhelmingly trusted recommendations from "a person like yourself."

Two years after that data was released, new numbers from Nielsen suggest that trust in others has increased dramatically. In fact, 90% of consumers now trust recommendations from people they know.

The chart below demonstrates the Nielsen numbers from 2007 (in yellow) and the point difference in 2009.

For example, in 2007, 78% trusted recommendations from people known. In 2009, that number grew by 12 percentage points to 90%.

What’s interesting is that brand sponsored/built content is making great improvements in trust. However, it’s yet another nail in the coffin of traditional media–trust in newspaper opinions actually declined!

While we’re tapping our feet–waiting for Twitter to come to our search results page–Aardvark has been busy bringing its answer engine to Twitter.

As you may (or may not), know, Aardvark allows you to ask questions and receive answers back from real people in your network. Well, TechCrunch is reporting that  ‘vark now lets you ask questions from within Twitter:

For now, the integration only includes asking questions – if you add @vark to the end, Aardvark picks it up and adds it to your account. In future versions, they may try to integrate responses from Twitter directly into Aardvark as well.

As of yet, Aardvark isn’t tapping into Twitter to source the actual answers, but will get back to you via direct message with your answer. It looks something like this: