Marketing Pilgrim

For the past day and a half I have been able to listen to some of the leaders in the world of marketing discuss the trials and tribulations of marketing’s corner office dwellers: CMO’s. As I discussed yesterday there are plenty of specifics from these marketing leaders and I will likely be talking about some of the details in the near future.

In case you missed it, Facebook is pretty popular. As of June 2008, they’d beat MySpace in terms of total unique visitors worldwide (ballooning to twice as many uniques as MySpace in January 2009)—and even in the US, one of the few Facebook-is-#2 holdouts, Facebook has caught up to MySpace. Hitwise takes a look at the stats—and they say that Facebook Connect gave the popular social network the boost it needed to achieve world domination.

Hitwise mentions other factors that have helped FB: the new layout, mobile apps, especially for the iPhone and BlackBerry.

Back in March 2008, we first saw video live in Google search ads. However, eighteen months later, video ads are still scarce in the SERPs. But maybe Google’s rethinking that, according to a Reuters report about a conference call yesterday.

Google is looking at changes in their search ads:

“Our search ads have largely looked the same over the course of the past seven or eight years,” said Nick Fox, a Google director of product management, referring to the text ads that appear alongside Google’s search results.

Fox detailed various ways that Google is striving to liven up the ads. In August, he said, Google introduced a feature that allows advertisers to highlight multiple links to different products or brands within a search ad.

As a blogger who enjoys nothing better than nomming on delicious industry statistics, Google just served up a feast–and didn’t tell anyone.

Fortunately, RWW was kind enough to share news that Google UK has quietly rolled out Google Internet Stats for public consumption. Basically, it’s another of Google’s “structured search” efforts, this time taking stats and studies from around the web, and making them available from a single tool.

Et voila!

Now, this is not a perfect offering. First, it’s decidedly UK-centric–but that’s not a huge flaw in the border-less online world of data. Second, it’s either limited in data sources, or the search box is somewhat erratic. A search for data on “reputation” or “sentiment” turned up zero results–actually a blank page, so I don’t know if there’s just no data, or my search didn’t work.

Just a week after Google was granted a patent for its unique homepage design, the search engine has thrown it out the window. Yes, Google has made a HUGE change to the homepage design.

OK, I’m embellishing a little. Google has made a small change to the homepage…and it only applies to the search box.

The new super-sized search box comes with larger text and….erm, that’s it. Oh, and you’ll also see a larger search box at the top of your Google search results page.

Here’s how the change looks:

You can read the official announcement here, but really, there’s not much to add to this announcement.

Over the next day or so I will be giving you some information that I have been gathering while at the CMO Summit in San Francisco. The even is put on by the Aberdeen Group and thus far has been incredibly informative. I write that with a bit of surprise because unfortunately events often sound so interesting in the promotion but fizzle in the execution. Not thus far with this event. Here’s a quick recap of the first day.

Mike Linton, former CMO of eBay and Best Buy, Columnist for Forbes

As you might expect from someone who has this kind of experience there was plenty to discuss on the topic of ‘CMO Calculus: Balancing Innovation and Results’. My head was actually spinning after this one. Like most of the information that you get at these shows it’s not really a surprise because most of it makes sense when you hear it. What is interesting , however, is the sheer volume of things to consider.