Marketing Pilgrim

Everyone’s favorite pastime these days seems to be predicting the imminent demise of Google. Whether it’s because Bing is becoming a real competitor (to which I say puh-leeze) or that their unbalanced revenue generation with depends so much on search marketing ads or their difficulty with the social side of the web or how they are shuffling executives and losing talent. Those are the majors but the list goes on.

Well, yesterday Google reported its third quarter earnings and it doesn’t appear that this perception is quite aligned with reality.

From the Google Investor blog

“Google had an excellent quarter,” said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. “Our core business grew very well, and our newer businesses — particularly display and mobile — continued to show significant momentum. Going forward, we remain committed to aggressive investment in both our people and our products as we pursue an innovation agenda.”

Utilizing their vast collection of shopping data, Google is developing an alternative means of tracking inflation known as the Google Price Index (GPI). The effort is being headed by Google’s chief economist Hal Varian, and has the grand goal of providing more timely price index data.

The well known Consumer Price Index (CPI) provides a monthly measure of inflation based on pricing data gathered by hand from brick-and-mortar retailers along with other sources. The CPI data is published monthly and can be delayed by several weeks. Google’s method of utilizing online sources of pricing data offers a more real time reflection of pricing indexes.

Weber Shandwick is one of my favorite PR firms because Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross–its Chief Reputation Strategist–is a kindred spirit, when it comes to reputation management.

In particular, she’s fascinated by the role of the CEO in a company’s reputation management efforts and her latest report, Socializing Your CEO, does a great job of analyzing the social media habits of CEOs of the world’s largest 50 companies.

What did Web Shandwick learn about the top CEOs of the world?

• 97% communicated either through traditional or online channels
• 64% are NOT engaged through company websites or in social media
• 36% engaged through company websites or in social media
• 28% posted letter or message on company websites
• 18% incorporated video/podcast on company websites or YouTube channels
• 16% have a profile on Twitter (8%), Facebook (4%), MySpace (4%) or LinkedIn (4%)

Aol. has made some waves in the local Internet scene in the past year or so. With the proclamations of hiring hundreds of ‘real’ journalists (not sure where that stands, anyone at Aol. care to comment?) and the plan to have Patch.com be the hyperlocal site/blog of choice in hundreds of new locations (updates please?) Aol. is taking a real run at the local Internet marketing scene.

In an attempt to add to this effort (or confuse it since I can’t tell the difference at this point) the Aol. content machine has resuscitated an old Aol. property “City’s Best”.

paidContent.org tells us

Yahoo is in the news a lot as of late. That we all know. The news is rarely good but the reports coming from The Wall Street Journal and its tech blog All Things Digital is that there may be interest in buying the struggling web property. That could be the best thing for it.

At AllThingsD.com Kara Swisher reported yesterday

Make no mistake–there are no definitive offers on the table to do a variety of takeover deals of Yahoo by either private equity moneybags or from big media giants such as News Corp. or smaller Web firms such as AOL.

But that does not mean that major players are not circling Yahoo and assessing the situation aggressively, a fact reflected in the rise in the Internet giant’s stock price today based on the many rumors swirling around it.

You know the story. Digg changed the site in order to bring it more in line with modern social media. The old school Diggers got mad and threatened to leave. Kevin Rose said, oops, we messed up, then he left and Matt Williams took over as CEO and now he’s trying to dig out from under the mess he’s been handed.

Williams decided that the best way to address the problem was to say hello and I’m sorry.

“As many of you know, the launch of Digg v4 didn’t go smoothly, and we’re deeply sorry that we disappointed our Digg community in the process. Thank you for your patience and your extremely candid feedback — we hear you loud and clear.”