Marketing Pilgrim

We have seen and heard so much in the past week about the cyber attacks in mid-December on Google that originated from China that now the story has shifted. Of course assessing the damage and closing the holes that exist at Google are a main priority not to mention that Washington is pretty interested in putting more detail on China’s digital espionage exploits. In the midst of this though is a rumor that is being reported by Reuters that this may have all been an inside job done by Google staff in the China office.

Reuters reports

Google is investigating whether one or more employees may have helped facilitate a cyber-attack that the U.S. search giant said it was a victim of in mid-December, two sources told Reuters on Monday.

In college I got a minor in Art History, a topic that I wish I could study more. At the time I had no idea that I would one day work in the marketing industry. Now, I see tons of overlapping concepts of art and marketing. I think I will discuss some of these ideas every now and then in this weekly column. In marketing we use artists and designers every day to create ads and materials. What I am going to talk about is artistic concepts that drive the way we view and talk about the world around us. So if you are looking for design tips, this isn’t the right column!

In case you’ve forgotten, 2009 was the year the FTC decided to go after mom bloggers (and other bloggers) with $11,000 fines for not disclosing reviewed freebies, sponsored posts or other relationships with companies—or not.

Despite the fervor over the FTC’s new guidelines, the fact is that they were designed to target a specific group of bloggers—ones making a living (or just a killing) off free products which they automatically gave glowing reviews. (And let’s face it, who’s going to be sorry to see them go?) But the guidelines were written widely enough to apply to mom bloggers who use coupons to book reviewers who receive advance review copies, even though neither of those situations guarantees a good review or even coverage.

Rumors of MySpace integrating Facebook Connect have circulated since October. And now it looks like they’re coming true: MySpace’s Fan Video site allows users to login with either MySpace or Facebook accounts.

The Fan Video site itself takes professional music videos and inserts your profile picture prominently. The site also features sharing capabilities to post the videos to MySpace, Facebook or Twitter. Additionally, you can create videos for your friends using their profile pictures, and you can choose these friends from your MySpace or Facebook friend lists (depending on which account you used to sign in).

Not a super-useful application (more fun than sheep throwing, I guess), but is this a harbinger of things to come for MySpace? Are they ready to concede the social networking arena to Facebook?

Nielsen watches just how much time people spend on the sites of the top web brands in the world. It makes for some interesting viewing. Just seeing the numbers from the chart below makes it obvious why some sites have the success they do and raises questions about some others. Here is one of the Nielsen charts (there are a few others not pictured).

There are no real surprises on the list although many of the ‘holding’ companies like AOL and IAC of top web properties seem out of place. They are not their because of there for their overall brand but more so because of individual properties and theirs. But hey, get the exposure any way you can right?

I just scanned the last six posts here at MP and they all have the Google logo attached to them. What’s strange about this story is that while Yahoo is announcing an improvement in their paid search offering it still relates to Google. As for bing? Where are you? The company that is having their search platform replaced by you is making more noise.

So what has Yahoo done? It has created an easy way for users of the Yahoo paid search platform to import data from their Google Adwords campaigns. In other words, Yahoo is saying “We know how much you use Google Adwords so just ‘copy and paste’ it to us and spend with us. Please!” MediaPost reports on this and let’s us hear Yahoo’s version.