Marketing Pilgrim

Last week, Chinese officials reported that Google was in talks about their threats to leave the country (or only partially) if they’re forced to continue censoring search results. Also, Chinese officials reported that Google was not in talks with the government.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt declined to comment on the state of negotiations a conference in the United Arab Emirates today. However, he did say that “we’re in active negotiations with the Chinese government, and there is no specific timetable,” although he promised “Something will happen soon.”

Google announced a hacking attempt targeted at the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists in January. They suspected that the attack may have originated in the Chinese government on some level, and announced they would no longer agree to censor search results. However, nothing has changed—yet.

Rome wasn’t built in a day.

A journey of a thousand miles, begins with a single step.

If you’re going through hell, keep going.

It’s always the darkest before the dawn.

Whatever the cliché being thrown around in Redmond, it must be working, because Bing’s US search share continues to nudge ever upwards.

According to comScore’s data, Bing climbed from 11.3% to 11.5%, likely stealing that share from the "we’ve given up on search" Yahoo, which dropped from 17% to 16.8%.

The only kink in Microsoft’s plan to catch Google? Google’s share increased too–up from 65.4% to 65.5%.

Lots of cool Twitter statistics coming out of Barracuda Networks new study (pdf).

Where do I start?

• 21% of Twitter users are actually using the service–meaning that have at least 10 followers, follow at least 10 people, and have tweeted at least 10 times.
• 74% of Twitter users have less than 10 followers! However, that number is improving with a 30% increase in the number of users with 10+ followers (since June 2009)
• 60% of Twitter users follow less than 10 people
• 34% of Twitter users have more followers than others they are following, showing an 70% increase from 20% in June 2009
• 73% of users have less than 10 tweets, as compared to 79% in June 2009.

There’s good news for online retailers: Forrester is predicting a 10% growth rate for you guys!

In fact, online sales will increase from $173 billion this year to a healthy $249 billion in 2014. Along with that growth comes a nice bump in online retail’s share of all US retail sales: up from 6% to 8% share.

Forrester says our spending on clothing, consumer electronics and computers will lead the growth spurt.

Have you heard of the Streisand effect?

Long story short, in 2003 Barbra Streisand sued a photographer for $50 million because he took photos of her home. She said the photographs invaded her privacy. Unfortunately for her, the rest of the world had no clue of the existence of these photographs until after she filed the lawsuit. Filing the lawsuit created a greater issue than if she had just kept quiet.

Enter Lindsay Lohan.

The almost popular, but now notsomuch, actress is suing E-Trade for, get this, $100 million for naming one of its TV babies “Lindsay.” Apparently, Miss Lohan believes that she has obtained “single name” status–like Madonna or Oprah–and that everyone that sees the milkaholic manboy-stealer will instantly think of her–and that will ruin her stellar reputation.

Social media or networking or whatever it is you want to call it continues to grow at exponential rates of speed. With the “announcement” of Facebook getting its own location based service in place the concerns over privacy and safety of information continue to grow as well. Twitter realizes this concern and is working to make Twitter free from malicious users especially in light of recent phishing attacks that have created some concern in the Twitter world.

In a Twitter blog post entitled “Trust and Safety” the company says that it is concerned and is working to make the world safer for tweeters of shapes and sizes.