Marketing Pilgrim

So Google’s facing an inquiry from the European Commission after accusations of anti-trust. Naturally, Google’s not taking this lying down. On the European Public Policy blog, Matt Cutts responds to allegations of anti-competitive practices by sharing their secret sauce, PageRank. But are they transparent enough?

(Yeah, the link is just the original Stanford paper on Google that discusses the basic principles of PageRank as defined 10 years ago.)

Google outlines all its efforts to help webmasters and increase its transparency, including:

• “Google has continued to publish literally hundreds of research papers over the years. Those papers reveal many of the “secret formulas” for how Google works and document essential infrastructure that Google uses.”
• “In 1999, Sergey Brin participated in the first Search Engine Strategies conference for webmasters.”

You’d think that with all the SEO conferences Google sponsors and speaks at, it would have at least some grasp of basic search engine optimization techniques, right?

Yeah….no.

According to a self-examination, Google is about as bad at SEO as any multi-billion company. In fact, you might argue that Google’s SEO efforts are worse than most. After all, pretty much everyone knows that a well structured Title tag format is key to good rankings, right?

Well, apparently not all of us:

OK, let’s stop it right here. I grew up in England, so maybe things are different in the US, but 10/100 only merits a “Needs Improvement”?? If I achieved a 10% on anything in school, it would warrant a smacked bottom and no dessert! Needs Improvement is a little understated, don’t you think?

When we publish pretty charts and report on studies, I’m often asked: “What about the B2B guys?”

Hold on to your inventory, here they come!

Forrester is predicting a significant uptick in internet marketing by those in the B2B space. In fact, it’s predicting spend will almost double over the next five years–going from $2.3 billion in 2009 to $4.8 billion in 2014!

So, where do the B2B marketers plan to invest?

You can’t blame them for focusing on paid search, after all, it’s a channel with controlled spending and measurable ROI. Still, that doesn’t mean there won’t be corks popping in the offices of social media gurus.

Okay, it’s not the first time, but it does seem like a rather momentous one: bloggers are now being granted press passes from the City of New York. These passes allow qualified journalists to and even sometimes within police and fire lines (within reason, of course)—and everything from bloggers to other online-only content providers.

Although bloggers are often recognized as press members at sporting events and even political meetings, a city officially recognizing online media as a legitimate news source isn’t something we’ve seen happen very often. Giving online content providers the same rights and privileges that they extend to traditional media shows a pretty impressive respect—and it does feel like bloggers have finally arrived.

A little over a month ago, Facebook revealed a planned conversion tracker tool to help marketers track the value of Facebook Pages and fans. Today, analytics firm Omniture announces “A new solution . . . to buy media on Facebook and measure its influence across digital marketing channels.” Any relation?

Facebook isn’t the only thing Omniture’s newest efforts will be tracking. They’re also adding:

• Display ad targeting, using Omniture customer segment data and testing through partnerships with ad networks
• New mobile analytics, including app measurement for the iPad
• Regular analytics improvements, using Experian (HitWise) demographic data
• A new “Idea Exchange” (forum?) for users to communicate directly with engineers and product managers on new feature ideas

However, the Facebook deal may be most key. MediaPost reports the plans to expand the agreement:

Yahoo celebrated its 15 year anniversary yesterday and Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz decided that it would be the perfect time to take a swipe Facebook.

When asked why Yahoo wasn’t as hot as Facebook, she replied: "Facebook? What’s their revenue?"

Oh no she didn’t!

Well, as if on cue, Inside Facebook comes up with some compelling calculations that suggest Facebook will hit $1.1 billion 2010.

First, their calculations for 2009–keep in mind these are simply guestimates.

Then, estimating revenues for ads, partnerships, virtual goods, and such, they come up with their 2010 prediction:

A wide variety of sources we spoke to expect Facebook to pass $1 billion in revenue this year, possibly reaching $1.1 billion. This is significant growth, but likely still the start of the hockey stick.