Marketing Pilgrim

It appears that it is finally safe to say that if mobile hasn’t completely arrived it is certainly in the room and recognized for its potential. Should we declare 2010 as the ‘Year of Mobile’? Sure, why not. There will be others and honestly it means nothing to hype it. Let’s look at what’s actually going on at street level.

Over at the ZDNet’s  Between the Lines blog, Larry Dignan tells us about a survey from the Bernstein Research’s Jeffrey Lindsay did some research among 360 smartphone users that follows up some initial research he did in the mobile advertising space. Here is some of the information that you may find interesting

• 67 percent of respondents said that smartphones increased their Internet usage for personal use and 45 percent said work related usage rose.

At the rate Yahoo is dumping its own technology and partnering with others, the only thing left that will be “Yahoo built” will be these bloody big pens:

A little over a year since Yahoo announced the expansion of Yahoo Profiles, the search engine, portal, social network, we-don’t-know-what-we-are company is apparently ready to ditch its own social network aspirations and jump into bed with Facebook:

It will enable them to connect with Facebook friends on Yahoo!, view a feed of their friends’ related activity on Yahoo!, and share content—such as photos from Flickr or comments on news stories—with all of their friends on Facebook. The content that consumers share with Facebook friends will then create a loop that drives visitors back to Yahoo!.

For this post, I need two volunteers!

Let’s take this announcement from Google:

…we’ve decided to allow publishers to limit the number of accesses under the First Click Free policy to five free accesses per user each day. This change applies to both Google News publishers as well as websites indexed in Google’s Web Search. We hope that this encourages even more publishers to open up more content to users around the world!

And yes, you sir. The Financial Times report on how much news scraping exists on the web:

The study of 101,000 articles published by 157 newspapers found that more than 75,000 sites reused 112,000 almost exact copies without authorisation, and a further 520,000 articles in part…The study found Google accounted for 53 per cent of the advertising being run alongside unlicensed stories…

All of the talk of how things were on ‘Black Friday’ is now followed by the yearly quest for the Cyber Monday data. We in the online world love to see just how much the shift to online commerce continues to overtake the traditional way that goods and services are sold. Whether these numbers are inflated or given too much credit is always a concern but this year’s trends, at least from a few sources, points to the continued rise of online growing while brick and mortar struggles.

To what degree this year’s trending points to a larger economic trend is a huge TBD (to be determined). Honestly, more people may have experimented with online purchasing to save time and money including gas and food that is part of the in-store shopping experience of a venture out on Black Friday. That’s just my thought and there is NO scientific backing on that one.

Google, you’re late!

I mean, c’mon, you let both Bing and Yahoo release their top search query lists before you. Is this a sign of things to come, Google?

And….AND…you’re not even telling us what the most popular searches are. You’re only revealing the fastest rising queries?

[Yawn]

OK, so Michael Jackson tops Google’s list–no surprises there. So what were the surprises?

1. Microsoft should have named its new version of Windows "Lady Gaga":

2. We’ve lost about as much interest in President Obama as we have the Beijing Olympics:

Fastest Falling (Global)

1. beijing 2008

Yesterday, Andy took a look at the top searches for bing in 2009 (am I supposed to capitalize bing or not, someone PLEASE clear that up for me). Today, courtesy of Digital Beat we look at the top searches for Yahoo for 2009. Whether they are playing follow their new leader or they want to still be known as a search engine, honestly I don’t know. One thing for sure is, as Anthony Ha, wonders aloud

While we’re on the subject of “year in review” lists, I’ll add that I’m baffled that these lists are coming out now. I understand why some publications feel comfortable doing a list of the best movies or books or whatever (since critics have often received advanced copies or screenings of what’s coming out before the end of the year), but search terms? Really? Don’t we have another month to go?