Marketing Pilgrim

Cause you’re hot then you’re cold
You’re yes then you’re no
You’re in and you’re out
You’re up and you’re down

I think perhaps Katy Perry should get out of the music business and get into the world of search engine metrics. I suggest this because she hits the nail on the head, when it comes to analyzing the market share of the various search engines.

After Nielsen yesterday painted a picture that portrayed additional market share for Yahoo, a drop for Google, and an overall climb in search activity, comScore decides to whitewash over it with a completely different picture of the industry in the U.S.

First, overall searches didn’t climb, but actually dropped 3.5% from June to July. And, while it concurs Google saw a drop in search share–albeit a more modest 0.3%–it’s also claiming Yahoo saw its share drop from 19.6% to 19.3%.

TechCrunch reports that multiple credible sources have confirmed that MySpace, the first social network to garner the hype (then hatred) of the media mind, is fighting its way out of stagnation with a possible acquisition of music-social site iLike. TC lists the price tag as $20 million for the first acquisition since Owen Van Natta (former COO of Facebook) took the helm in April.

iLike is a social music recommendation system. You may have seen the iLike app on friends’ Facebook profiles (or use it yourself), since the app has nearly 10 million users. TechCrunch reports that it’s the top music app on Facebook—and Bebo and Hi5 and most social networks (other than MySpace, which has MySpace Music). With such a wide user base, it seems like iLike was ripe for the picking.

Would you pay for more followers on Twitter? Apparently some people would—a few providers have found a way to monetize the popular microblogging site with selling more followers.

uSocial is one such service. For a mere $87, you can get 1000 new Twitter followers. uSocial made headlines recently when they claimed that Michael Jackson’s family bought the late pop star 25,000 more followers after his death. uSocial also claims to strive to match your profile to potential followers‘ interests, and to grow your Twittership over time—a far more organic approach than it sounds like on the surface (admit it—you were thinking they just had thousands of dummy accounts).

But soon, even that seemingly-legit kind of matchmaking may disappear from Twitter. CNET reports that uSocial says Twitter’s gunning for them as spammers.

If we all based trends on one month’s data, from a single research company, we would have been out of the longest recession in 80 years already. Instead, economists know that we need to see a trend that covers many months, with many data points pointing the same way.

I’m not an economist, but even I can grasp that Nielsen’s data–showing Google losing market share to Yahoo–should be viewed as an outlier, until we see an ongoing trend.

The data in question shows Google losing 1.3% in search share from June to July, while Yahoo picked up about 0.8% of that share.

Here’s June:

And here’s July:

Gmail is officially out of beta and it’s enjoying being all grown up, thank you very much. Maybe it just needed to have its training wheels taken off so it could really get moving but we all know that the beta label was just that; a label. Since its introduction over 6 years ago Gmail has been growing steadily and as TechCrunch reports it has moved past AOL’s email service to be the third largest email service in the US.

comScore has given this title to Gmail based on unique visitors to the service and it has just passed the AOL service with 37 million unique visitors in July while AOL had 36.4 million visitors. As if AOL doesn’t already have enough trouble with just being AOL this kind of news is not what they need to hear. It doesn’t appear as if this is going to be a close race either since the two services are headed in very different directions.

Break out the Friday Crystal Ball as we take a look into the future of the mobile world. We are traveling across time and space and we see smartphones, boatloads of smartphones (Carol Bartz rocks!), and the number of apps that are downloaded look like they have grown by three times the amount of today’s numbers. Ok, so come on back to the present and find that because the number of apps downloaded in the future are triple of that today then the folks at Frost & Sullivan as reported by the Internet News were right with their predictions. Nice work!