Marketing Pilgrim

Wow, if you thought Google was dominant in search, you need to redefine your idea of dominant.

It is impressive enough that Google controls around 80% of the search marketing in the US, but according to Chitika, that doesn’t include the search share it gets from being the default search engine in Firefox.

That share alone is estimated at 9.18%, which is larger than the general market share of Yahoo or Bing!

The Mozilla Foundation earns most of its revenue from its partnership deal with Google. Now we know why the search giant is willing to hand over a eight figure sum each year. If I were Microsoft, I’d offer Mozilla a deal they couldn’t refuse. After all, isn’t, say, $500M a year worth it to secure an instant 9% market share?

Being a global marketer has always presented unique challenges for a variety of reasons. Some of those reasons include lower adoption rates of technologies or tools in some areas, cultural barriers and the old standby, lack of resources. A recent study conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of Buddy Media highlights just how tough it can be to be a global marketer even in today’s hyper connected social world.

The chart below shows highlights the general issue quite well. Note: this poll was conducted with 105 brand managers who have global responsibility.

In today’s world though the silver bullet is social media. Everybody gets it and does it, so it must be easy. Heck, Facebook itself has 500 million ‘active’ users so they can reached there, right? Not so fast. At least according to this poll, that may be the view of ‘experts’ and ‘gurus’ but reality-based marketers have a different view.

The battle of the search engines is now shaping up even more as bing works to update and improve its own maps delivery. As with anything, competition is good and this kind of effort will give Google a shove to stay on top of its maps game. It also helps to highlight some other aspects of this search ‘arms race’ that are kind of stupid but, hey, it’s the Internet so what would you expect!

Bing is upgrading its maps to do some fun things through its “King of Bing Maps Challenge”. Below is the taxi fare calculator feature that is pretty slick.

The internet is all a buzz this week about the return of Mad Men on AMC. From the amount of hype, you would think that it’s one of the hottest shows on the air in terms of ad revenue, but that’s not true. According to an article in Advertising Age, Mad Men pulled in only $1.98 million in ad revenue last year on a show that costs 3 million per episode to produce. Part of the problem is that the show, despite all the critical acclaim, has an audience equal to about one fifth of a network show like CBS’s NCIS. And yet, AMC declares the show a hit and continues to produce it along with partner Lionsgate. Why? Because direct sales isn’t the only way to measure a marketing campaign’s success.

Here’s the news that didn’t quite make the cut today:

• Echo Brings Comments To Your Homepage With Real-Time River
• Dilbert.com Uses Custom Search to Increase Revenue
• Is There A Need For A Dedicated Journalism Outfit To ‘Follow Up’ On News?
• Town uses Google Earth to find unpermitted pools
• Minnesota Law Goes After Phony Local Advertisers
• How Google Might Fight Web Spam Based upon Classifications and Click Data

Google is rolling out a feature to help those folks with multiple Google accounts to keep track of everything without making themselves too nutty.

The Google Operating System blog explains it this way.

When you enable this feature, the most significant change is that you’ll see a new drop-down next to your email address in Gmail and other supported Google products. Click on the drop-down and you can sign in to a new Google Account without signing out from the previous account.

There is also some information from the Google Help Center that only served to confuse me.