Marketing Pilgrim

Often we forget the little guy, the SMB, in our discussions of the comings and goings of the Internet marketing industry. Sure there are times like this when a report surfaces talking about their issues and concerns but, for the most part, we like to talk about big brands and how they do the Internet marketing thing well or not so well.

Of course, when you consider that 95% of the businesses in the US are considered an SMB of some shape or size it should make one think a little more about the impact this market segment has in the overall scheme of things. Unfortunately, ‘too big to fail’ bailouts don’t await the little guy. Instead the SMB needs to make due with what they have and be as smart about how they spend their marketing dollars as possible.

I’ve been a contributing analyst for the eConsultancy/cScape Customer Engagement Survey over the past few years. The 2010 edition has just landed and I thought I would share with you the data that jumped out at me.

Email Newsletters Fading?

The 2nd Customer Engagement Survey saw businesses focusing their efforts on using email newsletters to improve customer engagement. An incredible 69% of companies stated that they had measured a tangible improvement through their e-newsletter campaigns so it was not a surprise that 59% planned to invest heavily in email marketing by the time we came to the third survey. By contrast, investment in social networks – such as Facebook – was down on the list of priorities with only 36% of companies planning to increase their investment in that area.

One of my favorite uses of Google is as a dictionary.

Seriously!

I don’t need it so much as spell-checker–it fulfills that role too–but if I want to look up the definition of a word, or make sure I’m using it in context, I turn to Google.

Well actually, I turned to Answers.com–which used to supply the definitions if I clicked on the top right link in the search results:

It’s no coincidence that I used the word “screwed” in the above screen capture. That’s what Answers.com will likely be, now that Google has decided that those links should go to its own dictionary:

Step 1: Spend ~$100 million on an advertising campaign.

Step 2: Let your site go down:

Really? Not anything? Sad.

UPDATE: Around 30 minutes later, the big shark is back:

Now we wait to see if Bing provides an explanation or pulls a “Tiger Woods” on us.

UPDATE 2: Bing explains the outage. Read it, and see if you can tell what’s missing from its statement:

Bing.com was down between about 6:30 and 7:00 PM Pacific Time on Dec 3, 2009. During this time, users were either unable to get to the site, or their queries were returning incomplete results page.

The cause of the outage was a configuration change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences.

Two years ago, Microsoft bought a 1.6% share of Facebook for $240M. In exchange, Microsoft Live (and now Bing) provided web search for the most popular social network in the world. Two months ago, the two companies entered another deal with Bing to integrate public updates on the social network into Bing search results on real time searches.

Okay, this time, it’s not really that big a deal, but Bing and Facebook are here yet again, reminding us all how buddy-buddy they are (and thus how cool Bing is, really, guys, can I play now?).

As part of their continuing $100M marketing blitz, Bing is running a contest with Facebook. The theme is “hometown pride.” (I’ve got this great picture of my son. . . .) and the winning image will be featured as the Bing background on January 6.

Isn’t everything better with Twitter?

All right, let’s admit it: we had to see at least part of this coming. Microsoft Live search had maps with bird’s eye view and even the equivalent of Street View in some places, and we all had to know that eventually that product would get rolled over to the Bing brand, too. Well, now that’s happening: but Bing wants to take it to the next level.

And, of course, the best, most obvious way to take maps to the next level is to add Twitter. Everything is cooler with teh social, right? Now in beta, Bing Maps uses the same Silverlight technology that Microsoft Live Maps did, including directions, street-level views and even museum tours—but now with Twitter’s geolocation API, they have a “mash in” to add Tweets (so not only can you see the mummies, you can also read 19 Tweets saying how boring they are).