Marketing Pilgrim

I’ve heard that a company can get so big, it can "put you on the map," but Google is apparently SO massive, it can put whole villages on the map–even ones that don’t exist!

The UK’s Telegraph reports on the fictitious town Argleton that’s appearing in Google Maps. The town doesn’t actually exist, but because it’s in Google Maps, it’s causing a few headaches:

An internet search for the town now brings up a series of home, job and dating listings for people and places "in Argleton", as well as websites which help people find its nearest chiropractor and even plan jogging or hiking routes through it. The businesses, people and services listed are real, but are actually based elsewhere in the same postcode area.

Imagine just a few short years ago what a headline like this may draw out from the newspaper industry and newspaper readers alike. The shock of such a claim would be the first reaction followed by the naysayers that would predict the rapid decline and fall of the newspaper company silly enough to make such a move.

Welcome to 2009. The newspaper industry is a shambles and no one is able to cover up the fact anymore. Online delivery of news and media of all sorts has changed the way consumers obtain and ingest the news. As a result the delivery is changing. In a way, it’s like a huge media train wreck that has people doing and saying things never imagined before. Are you shocked, though? Desperate times call for desperate measures and it looks like the Tribune Co. newspapers are ready to at least experiment with an idea that was unfathomable until recently. No AP news wire service for the week of Nov. 8.

Ad Age today summarize the state of the search engine marketing industry—and it’s largely good, including the fact that we’ve weathered the recession well so far, we’ve seen tremendous growth over our lifespan and most marketers are convinced of, interested in or doing SEM in some form.

Naturally, the report focuses on the elephant in the room—the biggest search engine in the world. Google dominates the search market in almost every country of the world—but there are a few places where competitors might be able to find a chink in Google’s armor.

Bingahoo is cited as one possible challenger, although by the measure Ad Age is using, a combined Yahoo/Bing share would be 26% to Google’s 65% of the market. However, Bing has shown notable success, including a report from Nielsen in July:

OpenX has long been angling for Google‘s online ad dominance. And after a new multi-year deal with Microsoft, announced this morning, they’ll have an even bigger ally in the fight. The partnership has been in trials for over a year, but is now official.

Explains TechCrunch:

Under the agreement, Pasadena-based OpenX becomes a preferred partner to publishers for enterprise ad serving solutions and has agreed to promote Microsoft’s Content Ads monetization products and eventual future products to its own roster of web publisher customers.

OpenX said that publishers usings its recently launched OpenX Market and Ad Server products will be able to use MS’s Content Ads, and that the Redmond software giant will refer potential customers to OpenX.

Here’s an interesting twist on the ‘pay for access to conten’t dilemma that faces the newspaper industry these days. Newspapers who do this may actually lose a writer or two! While it’s not likely that staffers at any newspaper are looking to just walk out the door to another job because there really aren’t any but you may get some that are going to walk n principle.

A case in point is what happened at New York Newsday. The New York Times reports

Customers of Cablevision, the cable and Internet provider that owns Newsday, and people who subscribe to Newsday in print will still be able to browse Newsday.com unfettered. But Newsday recently announced that everyone else will have to pay $5 a week to see much of the site, making it one of the few newspapers in the country to take such a plunge.

We spend all day talking to each other about the importance of social media. I agree that it is important. We also seem to yell a lot about how social media can cure many marketing ills. I am often included in that kind of talk as well. We act as if social media is right for everyone to some degree or another. I feel that way most times but I am beginning to wonder if this is not putting the cart before the horse for the SMB (small and medium business) market.

The Center for Media Research shared a report that tells an interesting tale regarding the SMB and social media.