Marketing Pilgrim

Each time I find out about how Google is making strides in turning many of their popular services into a usable mobile form I am reminded of just how far mobile has to go. Honestly, I am naïve enough to think that a company like Google would already have done something long ago with an important feature like Google Finance to make it a mobile standard. Guess I was wrong. If Google is playing “catch-up” then just how far behind is the rest of the world?

From the Google Mobile blog (which was from a cross post from the Google Finance blog which brings up the point that it is a part time job trying to keep up with all the blogs Google has but anyway)

Last week, Groupon members got a great deal, $50 worth of clothing at The Gap for only $25. More than 440,000 subscribers took advantage of the deal and they did it so quickly, they temporarily stalled the servers at the popular new deal site.

Part of the reason for the huge influx was that it wasn’t just Groupon members who were clicking. Shortly after the deal was announced, the news spread over thousands of mommy blogs, Twitter accounts and Facebook pages. I came across more than twenty mentions of the deal during my usual travels around the web and it looks like I was one of the rare few who resisted. Still, I’d venture to say that Groupon got a lot of new signups that day.

Local online ad spending is climbing faster than expected with sales reaching a number in 2011 that was originally predicted for 2012.

According to a study by Borrell Associates, which was reported on by PaidContent, online ad spending is likely to rise 18% next year rising to $16.1 billion dollars. Ad spending overall is expected to hit $51.9 billion which equals a 14% growth.

This is a nice leap over this year’s spending which is likely to rise less than 2% from last year. Borrell says this upswing is coming mostly from the rise in targeted advertising to local audiences and “everything involving social media.”

None of this is surprising given that “local” is the magic word of late. Everyday the marketing news is filled with stories about new mobile apps, websites and social media sites that are helping business target the customers in their neighborhood.

Fresh off its success in helping to take the Apple Antennagate fiasco to a new level, Consumer Reports may be trying to make a name for itself in the world of the mobile Internet.

According to the LA Times the group is now making some waves in the area of mobile payment security.

{Consumers Union} the nonprofit testing and information organization, which publishes Consumer Reports, called on regulators Tuesday to implement protective standards on mobile payments.

Federal law currently shields credit or debit card holders from many charges associated with lost, stolen or misused cards. But without industry-wide rules for “digital wallet” providers, consumers could risk losing money through fraud, merchant disputes or processing mistakes, the group said.

In case you haven’t noticed, I am not a big fan of politics or politicians. It doesn’t matter which side of the aisle they come from or claim to have allegiance to, to me a politician is a politician is a politician.

So what is happening in Florida Democratic primaries today doesn’t help me feel any better about these folks. According to ClickZ, some folks running are using mobile ads to help them get the vote during the ‘last mile’ to the ballot box (or whatever it is in Florida these days).

* maybe

Google has announced a change to the way it handles “branded” keyword searches. What are branded keyword searches, I hear you ask? Well, “apple” would be a great example of such a search. If you search “apple” you are–for the most part–looking for information on the electronics company.

Well, Google is making changes to the old rule that prevented more than 2 pages from showing in its results pages from the same domain. In fact, Google is giving some branded keywords a whole lot of real estate. A search for “apple” reveals 6 pages from the apple.com site:

So, why is Google making this change?

…today’s improvement will help users find deeper results from a single site, while still providing diversity on the results page