Marketing Pilgrim

Yahoo (moves toward the little blue bird, the center of attention at the party): Well, hello there, baby. You sure are popular here.

Twitter (BIG SMILE): Yep! And I have #friends @overthere and @overthere and—

Yahoo (slips an arm around the bird): How would you like to come back to my place for a little . . . integration?

Twitter: Whoa, buddy—this is why I carry an API at all times!

Back in July, Twitter was popping up everywhere: first a deal with Bing, then a deal with Google. Not to be left out, Yahoo made a real-time foray with OneRiot, but apparently they still had their eyes on the life of the party: Twitter.

Last month, Yahoo News integrated Twitter into its results for breaking news via a tabbed shortcut:

It’s been a long time doming, but now it’s officially, truly, official: AOL is part of Time Warner no more. (Technically, actually, AOL bought Time Warner—isn’t that weird?—and now they’re the ones being spun off.) And with its newly-single status, AOL is eyeing every woman in the room—especially old flame Yahoo.

They were flirting (or at least rumors have been flying) heavily last year, with reports resurfacing periodically. But now the love has turned to rivalry, with AOL and Yahoo both focusing on their Internet display advertising businesses.

AOL is also looking to take on other Internet behemoths like Citysearch, Yelp and Google in a local effort:

No wonder I have had this feeling lately that I am always full and the waistline is expanding a bit. It’s all this information and data that I am ingesting on a daily basis. Boy, if only limiting my data intake time would make the waistline go away I’d be there in a heartbeat but I digress. We all know that the average person is taking in more information on a daily basis than ever before but just how much is too much?

According to the New York Times:

The average American consumes about 34 gigabytes of data and information each day — an increase of about 350 percent over nearly three decades according to a report published Wednesday by researchers at the University of California, San Diego.

The move to trying to save more money online should come as no surprise to anyone for all the obvious reasons. With those reasons being so obvious we won’t belabor the point here (btw, for those wondering, the economy still kinda sucks). What is happening though, is the shift from the printed coupon to the online coupon is very real and is creating the same commotion in the heated online v. offline world as the news debate is. After all, many papers are clinging to the fact that their Sunday circulations remain OK because of the perceived savings offered by the coupons.

NCH Marketing Services, a subsidiary of Valassis Communications is reporting an increase of 30% use in traditional coupons with an additional $600 million in savings by consumers. Unfortunately, we often measure just how hot an industry is by how many lawsuits it generates.

When we first launched Trackur, my target audience was the person that had outgrown Google Alerts, but didn’t have the budget for the existing–expensive–online reputation monitoring tools.

Well, fast forward 18 months–and almost 13,000 registered accounts–and it turns out that Trackur is extremely popular among PR and marketing firms. You see, if they want to manage dozens of client accounts, they don’t want to have to blow their budget in the process.

That’s why we built the Trackur Agency plan. We’ve been quietly adding all kinds of great features:

• Unlimited client profiles
• Unlimited saved searches
• Direct client logins
• No contracts
• White-labeling

One of the things that bugged me about Google’s iPhone app was that clicking on a search result opened the page up in Safari. If my Twitter app can show me a web page within its own browser, why couldn’t Google figure it?

Well, it finally did!

The new Google Mobile App for iPhone just hit the iTunes App Store:

You can also change the colors of your iPhone app, turn on improved voice searching, and, get this, the new app supports Australians!

Huh?

Yeah, apparently…

…you can now choose your spoken language or accent. For example, if you’re Australian but live in London, you can improve the recognition accuracy by selecting Australian in the Voice Search settings. And now both Mandarin and Japanese are supported languages as well.