Marketing Pilgrim

I don’t know if you heard about this, but apparently late last year there was this small, no-big-deal cyber attack. You probably missed it when Google reported it in January, and started talking about leaving China for the next two months. And it was almost a non-story when they finally did shutter Google.cn. But now that we’re all caught up, Google CEO Eric Schmidt finally lets down his guard about how deeply, emotionally affecting these events were. When asked about security at a Q&A at Google’s Atmosphere 2010, he said, “Google is now particularly paranoid about that.”

Naturally, Google has upped security measures after they discovered the cyber attack, which exploited a flaw in IE6. Although the flaw was quickly patched, Google is moving to more secure Web-based systems—Chrome OS netbooks.

Not since Rocky came back to beat Ivan Drago in Rocky IV have we seen a comeback akin to the one being made by paid search.

According to SearchIgnite, U.S. paid search spend increased a whopping 11% in Q1 of 2010 from Q1 of 2009–”whopping” by recessionary standards!  In addition, we can actually celebrate a flat quarter, with paid search dipping just 0.5%, which is remarkable when you consider that there’s normally a drop after the holiday blitz.

It was a mixed bag for Microsoft’s Bing. Year-on-year, the search engine grew by 21.6%, but gave up 7.1% over the past quarter due to a heavy reliance on the retail industry.

(via)

“Google’s Schmidt to Bloggers: Drop Dead!”

Well shoot!

What am I supposed to say about Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s comments, now that RWW had already taken the “bloggers can drop dead” angle? How am I supposed to keep Pilgrims entertained, if the sensational has already be discussed?

How about I surprise you by agreeing with Schmidt, but first you need to read what he actually said:

There is an art to what you do. And if you’re ever confused as to the value of newspaper editors, look at the blog world. That’s all you need to see. So we understand how fundamental tradition and the things you care about are.

I totally agree. I guess ole Eric and I are on the same page: newspaper editors simply have little value these days.

It has been a long awaited and long talked about prospect but it looks like Twitter is finally letting us all know at least one way that they plan to make money. To literally no one’s surprise it will be through ads that Twitter calls “Promoted Tweets”.

The New York Times reports

Twitter will unveil on Tuesday a much-anticipated plan for making money from advertising, finally answering the question of how the company expects to turn its exponential growth into revenue.

The advertising program, which Twitter calls Promoted Tweets, will show up when Twitter users search for keywords that the advertisers have bought to link to their ads. Later, Twitter plans to show promoted posts in the stream of Twitter posts, based on how relevant they might be to a particular user.

We have been reporting over the past few months about Google’s aggressive push into the mobile space. It’s not like it’s a secret. Sometimes it’s so “in your face” that you wonder if the whole search engine thing is just keeping Google busy until they take over the mobile world that the future is shaping up to be.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt is out making the rounds talking to newspaper folks and now was talking to chief information officers according to MobileBeat.

Speaking at Atmosphere, Google’s conference for chief information officers, Schmidt said:

What’s really important right now is to get the mobile architecture right. Mobile will ultimately be the way you provision most of your services. The way I like to put it is the answer should always be mobile first. You should always put your best team and your best app on your mobile app.

New research from Brightcove and TubeMogul‘s joint video analytics venture suggests that Twitter may be a magic bullet for online video consumption. While Twitter’s 140-characters aren’t exactly designed to cure adult ADD, Twitter’s referral traffic to video sites shows that those visitors actually watch videos longer than the average user, and especially the average user from search.

This research focused specifically on music videos from the four big music labels (Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and EMI Music). And they found that:

consumers that find online music videos via Twitter watch an average of 2:30 minutes per stream compared to the 1:30 minutes viewed on average by consumers discovering online music videos via search engines like Yahoo!. However, 76% of online music videos viewed on artist and label sites are found through Google searches.