Marketing Pilgrim

A new report from Forrester Research, “The Broad Reach of Social Technologies,” takes a look at the growth of social over the last three years. And guess what? It’s growing!

The demographic data follows the trend we see overall—younger people are more heavily involved, but over-35s and over-55s are becoming more and more active in social networking. While 10% or less of online adults aged 18-34 are “socially inactive,” the older age ranges are showing high growth. Among adults 35-54, participation grew 60% over last year:

Well, no one can accuse Yahoo of sitting back and waiting for the Microhoo deal to get underway. Instead the soon to be social media destination (or is it already, I can’t tell) is increasing its reach and social media footprint into the Arabic world with the purchase of Arabic social media site Maktoob.

You’ve never heard of Maktoob? Unless you are part of the Arabic world it is not likely that you would have. In fact, most in the region admit that this entire area is still in its infancy with regard to the level of Internet penetration.  The Maktoob business site tells us

Yahoo! has agreed to acquire Maktoob.com, the Arab world’s largest online community, marking the first major investment by a U.S. technology company in a region where internet penetration is still in its infancy.

Microsoft rebranded and relaunched its search decision engine yet again in June with Bing. Since then, their marking onslaught has paid off a bit, with ever-increasing paid clicks and traffic.

But that news may be a little one-sided. TechCrunch reports on comScore’s global search numbers—and it’s not all roses for Bing. Their global numbers are actually slightly down since their launch in June.

(Christa Quarles at Thomas Weisel Partners, via TechCrunch)

Microsoft’s numbers are holding pretty steady, though—hovering around 3%. June, the month they launched Bing, actually showed 7% growth over May—but a 3% drop in July.

The really alarming trend, however, is in Yahoo’s global numbers. In the five months shown on this chart, their market share falls steadily, showing a 10% drop. (Google, meanwhile, sees 6% growth, or an increase of over 4 percentage points.)

The Center for Media Research has reported on a paper that reaches the conclusions that executives in many companies are worried about social media in some form or another. If it’s not how employees are wasting valuable company time as a result of their Twitter and / or Facebook fetishes (51%) it is about how their companies and brands are being represented in the social media world (49%). Legitimate concerns for sure but it is probably high time that executives stop wringing their hands about this stuff and just jump in with the rest of the sharks people.

About the study itself

While Google’s Street View is mostly well received, there are still plenty of groups and countries that claim it’s an invasion of privacy.

You can add Switzerland to that list.

Poor Switzerland. It’s bad enough that it can no longer promise US tax evaders customers complete anonymity, now there’s a chance the faces of those customers–and Swiss citizens–could wind-up plastered on Google’s maps.

Less than one week after the launch of Street View, Hans-Peter Thur, Switzerland’s federal data protection and information commissioner (FDPIC) has called for the immediate removal of the feature.

As always, Google is “surprised” at the move…

“We have been engaged in constructive dialogue with the organization ahead of [last] week’s launch to demonstrate how we protect people’s privacy on Street View. And we’re ready to do so again or to answer any additional questions.”

It’s not really a secret that Yahoo has given up on search. If handing the keys to the car over to Microsoft didn’t give it away, then the next step would be to run TV ads saying “We’ve! Given! Up! on Search!”–yeah, complete with those annoying exclamation marks, Yahoo! likes! to! use!

So, Yahoo really isn’t fooling anyone with the announced testing of a new search engine interface. Sure, superficially we get to see lots of cool new features such as “show results from” filters, social media content, video playback within search results, and a whole host of new whistles and bells, but it’s nothing more than prepping for surgery. In this case, the surgical implanting of Microsoft’s Bing.

Here’s a screenshot of how some folks will see Yahoo’s search results: