Marketing Pilgrim

Google’s bringing back the goats.

Yes, lawn-care companies around the country are officially panicking that Google has taken what appeared to be an isolated incident–a publicity stunt–and turned it into a tradition:

More than 200 goats from California Grazing have once again arrived at our Mountain View headquarters where they’ll stay for over a week chomping away on grassy goodness. The cost of bringing in the goats is comparable to hiring lawn mowers for the same job and the green benefits are clear: the goats eliminate mower emissions, reduce noise pollution, restore plant species and fertilize while grazing.

We’ve herd rumors that Microsoft is already trying to hire some of the goats and is exploring using its own goats and outsourcing them to Yahoo.

You know how it goes.

You’re sending and email and you want to attach a file.

If you’re in Gmail, that would normally involve clicking “Attach a file” and selecting the files you wish to add to your message.

What a drag!

Actually, that’s not a drag, man. This is!

See that? That’s a screenshot of someone using either Google Chrome or Firefox 3.6 and actually dragging and dropping files right into the email message!

And you thought you weren’t going to have anything fun to do this weekend!

I know, we’re all ready and geared up for the year that will finally be the year of the mobile. (This time, it’s for real! Maybe.) But apparently more and more consumers on the mobile Internet isn’t quite persuasive enough for retailers already pursuing multiple channels, according to research from Multichannel Merchant. eMarketer reports that in February 2010, while they were happy to explore options in SEO, social media, and conversion, four out of five multichannel retailers weren’t using any form of mobile commerce or advertising.

Mobile advertising is the most popular choice among the few that do use “m-commerce,” with an m-commerce site and an iPhone app as the next most popular. (Overlap indicates that at least 7% of retailers surveyed were doing two or more of the above activities.)

Hm…. If you saw a totally hypothetical article titled “Study Finds ‘Transparency’ Impedes Display Ad Growth,” would you assume that article was about transparency . . . I don’t know, actually impeding ad growth? Maybe I’m crazy, but I think that a study that finds the lack of transparency impedes display ad growth is the opposite of that headline?

Yeah, I must be crazy. But that is what AdSafe Media’s commissioned study (performed by the Winterberry Group: PDF white paper). In fact, that transparency isn’t what we might assume, either—the lack of transparency from ad networks and publishers about exactly where and in what context an ad might appear holds back an estimated $2 billion in ad spend.

While everyone is looking at the Chirp Conference to see what Twitter will do next there is more going on in the world of Internet marketing. In fact, an article in the New York Times addresses an interesting opportunity that the online space provides marketers that has not been as available in the past: extending the life of effective marketing campaigns.

With Google’s new Replay feature around tweets and the Library of Congress getting ready to archive every tweet as well, marketers now need to consider not just the ‘here and now’ of their marketing efforts.

The quest to decipher just how many actual users there are of Twitter continues. Yesterday at the Chirp conference being held for Twitter developers, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told the group that the number of registered users (let’s call them accounts) is 105 million. That is considerably more the 65 million that comScore has estimated the number at. Macworld reports

Twitter has 105 million registered users, with 300,000 new users signing up every day, Stone said, opening Twitter’s Chirp conference at the Palace of Fine Arts before an audience of just shy of 1,000 developers. That user figure is more than a recent estimate from comScore, which pegged Twitter’s user base at 65 million.