Marketing Pilgrim

Is this a classic case of “meet the new boss, it’s the same as the old boss” (hat tip to Roger Daltrey and the boys)? It is being revealed that AOL has a plan to bring itself back to prominence and it is oddly reminiscent of the company’s past AND its CEO’s past as well.

How you ask? Well, apparently there is a concerted effort underway to generate as much ‘craptent’ (that’s crappy content for those of you who need an assist) as possible to try to gain some ground in the search engine results. Techdirt has a little fun in helping us remember the days of mailboxes full of AOL CDs. How patently ‘ungreen’ of AOL. I don’t miss those days, do you?

I love a good search engine "smackdown"–even if I have to orchestrate it myself!

While Bing.com is making sure everyone knows that its homepage is not the boring, bland, search box that you’ve become accustomed to, Google is heading even further in the opposite direction.

Announcing its new "fade in" homepage, Google takes a shot across the bow of Bing:

…the "fade in" is an elegant solution that provides options to those who want them, but removes distractions for the user intent on searching.

Hmm, distractions like bloody great big sharks?

Now, let’s compare Bing’s homepage with Google’s new design:

"Opposite" meet "contrast."

Which do you prefer?

“You gotta be freakin’ kidding me!”

That was my reaction to a Reuters article that I came across. I am still a little taken aback, as they say, about the even the threat of the US government looking into ways to bailout the struggling newspaper / old school media industry. Right now it’s more talk than anything else but if someone said it in a public forum then you know there are greater rumblings going through Washington with a similar stink on them. I guess you can guess where I stand on this one, huh?

The Reuters article starts off

A top Democratic lawmaker predicted on Wednesday that the government will be involved in shaping the future for struggling U.S. media organizations.

The results are in: Cyber Monday (and Black Friday) = success! The numbers are actually up from last year, despite the state the economy is still in. And according to Hitwise, social sites helped to drive sales. (Yeah, FOR REAL.)

Their data shows that not only was US traffic up to social sites over the holiday weekend, but downstream traffic to online retailers was also up—especially to Amazon (Cyber Monday winner), Wal-Mart (Black Friday winner), Target, Best Buy and Toys R Us. Wal-Mart also saw the highest increase in downstream traffic from Twitter (among the Retail 500 that Hitwise tracks).

Is it hip to be square again? Maybe according to Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. His new startup, called Square, is a mobile payments (credit card processing) system that appeals to small businesses. But is he targeting the right customers?

I think we’ve all heard rumors of a credit card reader for the iPhone—and this is it. A small, white plastic cube plugs into the audio jack of an iPhone or laptop (with software planned for Blackberry and Android). It scans the card, geotags the transaction and emails a receipt to the buyer. And just to be clear, Square is an app for merchants, not a way for individuals to electronically zap their bucks into the nearest Starbucks to pay for their latte.

When Google’s Matt Cutts makes this statement on Twitter:

“This is important. Google provides webmaster tool to see how fast your site is…”

You can pretty much take to the bank that Google is getting ready to add site load speed to its complex search algorithm.

In fact, Cutts points us to this Google announcement:

On Site Performance, you’ll find how fast your pages load, how they’ve fared over time, how your site’s load time compares to that of other sites, examples of specific pages and their actual page load times, and Page Speed suggestions that can help reduce user-perceived latency. Our goal is to bring you specific and actionable speed information backed by data, so stay tuned for more of this in the future.