Marketing Pilgrim

Imagine for a second that I’m a doctor.

Now imagine that I specialize in…ahem…erectile disfunction.

Let’s say the average married couple has sexual intercourse 3-4 times a month–backed-up by most national surveys.

But, I conduct a survey among my viagra-popping patients, and release a report that suggests married couples are in fact having sex 8-10 times a month.

Would you throw out the other data? Or, would you piece this together and say, "wait a minute, of course you’re seeing a higher number?"

Well, that’s the observation I made when reviewing iCrossing’s new study that suggests Google accounts for almost 77% of search engine visitors–compared to the 65% and 71% suggested by comScore and Hitwise respectively.

Have you ever put together that questionable 140 character outburst or ‘observation’ and then experienced ‘tweeter’s remorse’ when you sent the poorly designed nugget of wisdom? It’s like that e-mail you didn’t want to hit send on (those really suck though because in most cases you have no recourse other than to start putting together an apology / explanation immediately). At least with Twitter you have always had the opportunity to ‘delete the tweet’ but Twitter had an annoying little habit of keeping that nasty little bugger in their search index. That was at least until recently. TechCrunch reported

Now, when you delete a tweet, it will instantaneously be removed from Twitter’s search index as well. We’ve tested it out this morning, and it is in fact the case. Even better, those tweets are also removed from the search API. We’ve tested several third party apps, and none contain the tweets that I deleted.

There are two brass rings in search these days: real time and social. Google (and Bing) have been working on the real time thing with Twitter, and last week Google announced they were working on a Social Search option in Labs—and now it’s out.

With Social Search, Google finds relevant public content from your friends and contacts and highlights it for you at the bottom of your search results. When I do a simple query for [new york], Google Social Search includes my friend’s blog on the results page under the heading “Results from people in your social circle for New York.” I can also filter my results to see only content from my social circle by clicking “Show options” on the results page and clicking “Social.”

As announced last month, Facebook is finally ending its unpopular advertising program, Beacon, through a court settlement. The class action lawsuit settlement only needed judicial approval to make it final. And last week we they got that preliminary approval. Once the deal is good and done, Facebook will officially end Beacon, and pay $9.5M in damages, according to Read Write Web.

Two-thirds of the fine would go toward setting up a non-profit foundation for therapy for people who had surprises ruined by Beacon “projects and initiatives that promote the cause of online privacy, safety and security.” The remaining $3+ M would go to the 19 plaintiffs, who could expect anywhere from $1000 to $15,000 a piece, according to MediaPost, and their lawyers (who could expect $2.7M or more). Hm. Once again, cui bono?

I know that this video of Google co-founder Sergey Brin at Web 2.0 Summit is widely circulating the interwebz, but not everyone is taking the time to watch it and highlight the interesting sound bites.

Here are some of the choicest quotes from Brin:

"I did not try to buy Twitter"

Admitted that AdWords was "a very lucrative revenue stream" although that wasn’t always the case.

"The internet is disproportionately efficient" as an advertising platform, compared to traditional advertising platforms.

Avoided answering a question about whether Google would build Android hardware.

"Bing has reminded us that search is a very competitive market."

"It’s a shame that Yahoo plans to abdicate" from search.

Doesn’t agree that Google is "stealing" from traditional news outlets such as the Associated Press.

Headline seem like it’s over the top? Maybe a little but a report has been released making the claim that Twitter costs the British economy 1.38 billion pounds on an annual basis. That’s a boat load of pounds! (We miss you Carol. Please say something outrageous soon, please!).

Regular readers will know how I tend to be a skeptic first on any surveys / research / reports that claim anything because let’s face it, most things are hard to quantify and even harder to draw definitive conclusions from. This one, which was reported in the Telegraph, set off the ‘Research Report Red Light’ quickly but it sounded just silly enough to look into further. The report says