Marketing Pilgrim

Yesterday, Google announced five little tweaks to Buzz. While they’re certain to please active users, they do little to address some of the issues Buzz has faced.

To be fair, Google has tried to address the major privacy concerns after Buzz’s initial (rushed) launch. Probably most important is the note that buried in your Gmail settings is the Buzz tab where you can disable the service if you’re not interested.

Probably the two most useful new features are a yellow bar to denote new items from the last time you checked your Buzz, and a way to keep your Gmail chat status from appearing in Buzz (putting it in parentheses. Obviously I love the parens, but in a chat status it’s kinda ugly, actually.).

What really goes on inside Google? Wired magazine’s Stephen Levy takes a peek inside the world’s most popular search engine. While most of what he saw will come as no surprise to people who’ve been in search at least a year or two, we do get a glimpse of some of the mechanisms the company uses to keep ahead of the competition.

Google really does strive to be all things to all people. They want to—and have to—”answer” questions asked in thought fragments, interpret meaning from snippets of sense and return relevant results. So how do they do it, while serving billions of queries? The same way a lot of us have to do things at work: meetings.

For real.

Google is re-branding both its DART for Publishers and Google Ad Manager products–and it’s all because of some surfing web site that can’t get a grip on its online advertising!

Sheesh!

Well, actually Google just uses a surfing site as an example of just how complicated it can be for publishers to manage their ads without the help of Google. Apparently, we’re all doomed unless we switch to Google’s sophisticated ad platform, so both of its popular programs are getting a makeover–because nothing makes you switch ad platforms like a shiny new logo. Right?

So, DART for Publishers now becomes…

And Google Ad Manager becomes…

Both flavors of the new DFP (DoubleClick for Publishers) get some nifty enhancements, including:

One of the hopes of anyone who paid the money to advertise on this year’s Super Bowl (or any year for that matter) is to generate sales and web traffic. In addition, it would be nice result if the number of searches for your brand went up as well. Based on some research by Hitwise, I suspect that the retention rate for Bud Light commercials run during the game goes down as the consumption rate of Bud Light during the game goes up but that’s my informal theory.

It appears that in the week following a Super Bowl people seem to need a little reminder (or some kind of aggregation) of what ads were run during the big game. Hitwise ran some numbers on searches for Super Bowl ads for the week ending February 13 to see what the search landscape looked like and it was not exactly brand specific.

Do you use any of Google’s products?

Search? Gmail? Reader? Docs?

Then you’re probably one of the laziest people on the internet. Look at you, pathetic!

Now, before you scroll down to the comments section to complain–which I know you will do anyway–let me add this: I’m lazier than all of you!

I started thinking about my cyber-lethargy after reading Tom Krazil’s account of how he gave up Google for a week. I know, that inner mocking voice of yours is thinking: ooh, a whole week? But have you tried it recently?

Krazil admits that it really wasn’t that scary to switch from Google–the world didn’t collapse around him–but it did take a lot of planning and the energy to break from his normal routine.

If there was ever a market segment that gets attention in big chunks (whether deserved or not) it’s the moms of the world. There are mommy bloggers who have held sway over brands and made brands bend to their will at times. The Motrin incident (sounds like social media’s answer to The Bourne Ultimatum doesn’t it?) was evidence of how this group can make a fuss and create change. This powerful market segment demands the attention of the online marketer in many areas because it is estimated that moms control 80% of household spending annually which represents a whopping $1.7 trillion (with a T).

eMarketer and BabyCenter is providing some insight into how this group works and the changes that occur in online behavior when a woman turns into a mom.