Marketing Pilgrim

Earlier this week it was reported by Fortune that the growth of Android devices had stalled in the 200,000 per day range. In the “Hey, we can’t be perceived as growing at just ridiculous speed but rather at ludicrous speed” (gotta love Spaceballs) world we live in, Andy Rubin, Google’s Android leader, tweeted yesterday.

Fortune then did an about face by saying the following

That passes Apple’s iOS, that passes Blackberry . That even matches any figures that Symbian has ever put up. Google is closing in on an astounding 10 million phones per month. Recall that Apple just had its biggest quarter ever with 14.1 million iPhones sold.

If you had to guess, what percent of American internet users would you say uses Twitter? 30%? 15%? 10%?

According to the latest report from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, the answer is 8%. Eight! How can that be? Twitter is one of the most popular social media services. Famous people Tweet every day. Twitter is used to help raise money during a disaster and detectives in England are being trained to use the service to help track criminals. So how can it be that only 8% of internet users are hanging with the bird?

In September’s Pew Report, it was noted that 24% of internet users used Twitter or “another service to share updates.” This time around, the researches asked a more specific question, namely, “Do you use Twitter?” Can’t get more specific than that.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced that they’re taking steps to assure user privacy with a new Do Not Track option in Internet Explorer 9. The announcement comes on the heels of a highly disputed recommendation from the FTC that would make tracking an opt-in only scenario.

Experts have complained that asking web users to turn on the ability to track them would be devastating for small business owners who depend on tracking to tightly target ads. Others have said that such a move would be impossible to regulate due to the wide variety of browsers and ad delivery systems.

Microsoft has come up with a middle-ground solution that, if it appeases the FTC, could be the way of the future.

I think most of you know how we have felt about the EU / EC’s attempts to investigate Google as a monopoly based on complaints by a few whiners in the search space. Well, it is refreshing to see someone who doesn’t have a US accent talk about the EU’s apparent lack of understanding of the digital world of business.

Matthew Lynn of Bloomberg gives his point of view in the video below (there is an ad at the start).

Lynn Says EU Trust Busters Fail to Understand Monopolies
Uploaded by Bloomberg. – Up-to-the minute news videos.

I am not trying to prove that I am right but what I am relieved by is that not everyone in Europe is accepting the EU’s approach to trying to control ‘what companies can do what’ in Europe.

Google’s local ad performance is one of the top priorities for the company according to Susan Wojcicki, who is a senior VP overseeing the advertising business at Google (and Sergey Brin’s sister-in-law). With the Groupon deal being a thing of the past Google is on to the next way to crack this critical market. It’s actually interesting to see a monster like Google struggle to get its arms around how it can capture one of the most elusive, and potentially lucrative, market segments in business: the SMB.

According to the Wall Street Journal

Empathica, Inc wanted to know more about how consumers were using social media in regard to brands so they sat down and interviewed 15,000 people from both the US and Canada. Okay, they didn’t actually sit down with all those people, but they asked the questions, the people answered and they published a nifty new report called The Empathica Consumer Insights Panel – Q2 2010, Issue 4.

I can’t say that their findings were very surprising but empirical validation is always nice, don’t you think? So here are the two key points:

When it comes to social media, six in ten consumers said they followed at least one brand. 40% of those people said they did it for coupons and promotions while the 30% said they were simply looking for “additional information.”  I’m bad at math, remember, but that does seem to leave a few people unaccounted for. Maybe they’re following brands for nefarious reasons and didn’t want to say.