Marketing Pilgrim

Is Google about to cause a revolution in China?

Seriously! Could Google’s decision to pull out from China become the wake-up call that Chinese citizens have been waiting for? Could they be willing to revolt against their communist heritage and demand democracy and free speech?

OK, maybe not, but that’s not stopped a few Chinese "netizens" from publishing a very stern open letter to both Google and China. The letter calls for answers to such questions as:

• Did Google meet the requirements of Chinese law in censoring material related to porn, violence, and gambling?
• How were the Chinese government’s censorship demands communicated to Google? From which ministry? According to what legal processes? Were there any mechanisms for correcting mistakes or channels for appeal?

Ever find yourself getting up in the middle of the night needing to go to the bathroom and then decide that it’s a good time to check Facebook to see if anyone else might be doing the same thing (or something else)? If you have then you are part of a group of people that can either be explained as really in touch or really out of touch depending on how you look at the situation.

eMarketer shares a report that was put together by electronics review site Retrevo. Not exactly a Forrester study I know, so please remember that any information that is passed off as research in this space is likely to have the actual research listed as a lower priority that the exposure it generates. With that in mind let’s look at just how connected some people need to be.

A few weeks ago Ken Fisher wrote a popular blog post about how ad blocking software can have devastating effects to the websites that you frequently visit. Mr. Fischer describes how ad blocking software is responsible for showing false page view data to ad networks. As a result each ad is priced at a lower rate because the number of impressions are significantly smaller. The number of page views is an extremely important metric for websites that sell advertising based on a CPM price model. So it’s only understandable that Mr. Fischer and other online publishers will hold a grudge against ad blocking software.

Social media is on the front of every marketer’s mind (or at least it seems that way) but it still gets the treatment normally reserved for those who don’t quite fit in. In other words, while there is tremendous value in social media it is still a tough road to travel to get social efforts integrated with traditional marketing campaigns. The techniques voted “Most Likely to be Siloed” include third party social networking site, blogs and microblogs. While all the talk centers on these areas there is still considerable concern about how well they play with other elements of marketing campaigns and just how to best help them fit in.

eMarketer tells of a report done by Unica which is a marketing management firm. Here are the numbers from this particular study.

Yelp is certainly an interesting phenomenon. Depending on where you live and who you talk to it can be either “all the rage” or it can elicit the “What’s a yelp?” response. Of course, in Internet marketing circles it’s all the rage especially in tech centers like NoCal etc. What is happening quite a bit as of late though, is not that yelp is “all the rage” but instead it is all about rage and, in particular, the rage of the small businesses being reviewed on the site.

The Wall Street Journal reports

As reported by the Journal, the reviews Web site Yelp is under fire. It is facing three lawsuits from businesses that claim it improperly skews reviews in favor of companies that advertise with it and against those that do not.

Take a look at the Google Analytics chart to the right.

Now imagine yourself waking up one day to see your web site’s traffic taking such a dramatic drop.

Did you get banned by Google? Is your site down?

Nope! But everyone just opted out of Google Analytics–rendering your dashboard useless.

Far fetched? Not too much. Not when you consider that Google has decided to build a browser plugin that will allow web users to prevent their data being collected by Google Analytics.

Over the past year, we have been exploring ways to offer users more choice on how their data is collected by Google Analytics. We concluded that the best approach would be to develop a global browser based plug-in to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics. Our engineers are now hard at work finalizing and testing this opt-out functionality. We look forward to make it globally available to our users in the coming weeks.