Marketing Pilgrim

When the announcement was made at the start of this year that Larry Page was moving to the helm of Google many wondered just what that might mean for the search giant. Now we are halfway through the year (with the official date of Page’s tenure beginning just at the start of April and things are changing rapidly.

Here is a rundown of what to expect over the next six weeks:

Google+ goes public – The grand experiment that is Google+ is expected to go from this limited field trial it is currently running to a full blown public service. This will be a watershed moment for Google since the widespread adoption of the social network will be critical for the search giant’s credibility in the social realm. That launch, whenever it happens (rumored on or before July 31), will be very interesting to watch.

Twitter is recognizing that in order to grow it simply needs to be a bit easier to use for people who don’t live and breath this stuff every day. It must be hard for these guys to admit it because it seems to take them an awful long time to make what appear to be simple changes.

The latest comes in the form of an experiment for a small percentage of Twitter accounts with a Facebookesque ‘wall’ for replies to an account right on that account’s profile page. Mashable ID’d this first.

The following description by The Business Insider is both funny and sad as well since it points out the great divide that we in the industry act as if it doesn’t (or at least shouldn’t) exist but it does in a way bigger than we all know,

The joy of reading digitally is that you can easily drill down deeper into any idea simply by cutting, pasting and searching as you go. Reading a review of a summer movie might have you searching for other films by the same director. An article about the health benefits of blueberries could trigger a search for recipes or even a local grower so you can pick you own.

On a computer, the mouse makes it easy to grab these phrases and go, but that same action is cumbersome on mobile devices. According to Bing, your average cut and paste search takes nine steps, but with their new app upgrade, you can do it in two (sort of).

Are you spending more money on online advertising? If so, you’re not alone. According to new numbers from eMarketer, almost every category of online advertising is growing and will continue to do so into 2015. At that time, they expect the market to hit 49.50 billion.

Search still claims the top spot for dollars spent, but video is the fastest growing format. The old fashioned banner ad is still climbing and email is the only category that slipped.

Who is benefiting from the rise in online ad dollars? The big five, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL and Facebook. eMarketer says that combined, they’ll claim 68% of 2011’s total online ad spending. That still leaves a nice chunk for smaller ad network and individual site buys which eMarketer recommends as a way of staying connected to a specific industry.

If I didn’t know better I might say that Google is beginning to turn the massive search only ship around quite a bit in the recent past.

Of course, it would be in their best interest to have a few more areas of success to keep the regulatory spotlight shining less brightly on their search dominance.

The latest information comes from NetMarketShare (hat tip to @btabke). Note that this data has not been checked by Quality Assurance according to the NMS site but, hey, that’s never stopped a blogger from reporting the cold, hard ‘facts’ in the past .

Here’s the picture version

And for you folks who like numbers here is more information

Mark Zuckerberg may be the most popular guy on Google+ currently but I suspect he doesn’t like the idea of people migrating their Facebook friends over to the Google product en masse. Of course, that doesn’t stop folks from trying.

The guys over at ZDNet are really trying to help. Last week Andrew Mager posted one way to get the whole shooting match over to Google+

Here’s a trick to get everyone from your Facebook social graph into Google Plus:

1. Sign up for a Yahoo! Mail account, and import all of your Facebook contacts. Click “Contacts” at the top, and then “Import Contacts”. Authorize Facebook access to your Yahoo! address book.
2. Log in to Google Plus (http://plus.google.com) and navigate to your “Circles” (https://plus.google.com/circles).
3. Click “Find and Invite”, and then click Yahoo! Import your Facebook friends to the “Suggestions” section.
4. Drag everyone into the appropriate “Circle”. See screenshot below.