Marketing Pilgrim

Google gets to have all the fun especially when it comes to quarterly earnings reports. Rarely is there any bad news and the third quarter of 2011 was no exception. As Larry Page reports from the Google investor relations announcemnent:

“We had a great quarter,” said Larry Page, CEO of Google. “Revenue was up 33% year on year and our quarterly revenue was just short of $10 billion. Google+ is now open to everyone and we just passed the 40 million user mark. People are flocking into Google+ at an incredible rate and we are just getting started!”

Though the economy still has us all singing the blues here in the US, eMarketer says that global digital ad spending will continue to shine on through. The rough estimate is $500 billion spent by the end of the year thanks in part to the rise in mobile marketing.

As you can see from this chart (over there –>) North America is responsible for the largest chunk of the spend and that trend is expected to continue. However, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East are all making their move.

Asia, in particular, is being influenced by mobile marketing. It’s one of the areas where mobile devices are the primary means of accessing the internet and though they only sit at about 55.4% penetration right now, that number should rise to 73% by 2015. Says eMarketer, that’s “an eye-popping 2.9 billion mobile phone users.”

eBay wants to transform the way we sell things on the internet and believe me, there’s not a drop of sarcasm behind that statement.

Technology has changed everything about the way we shop, but it seems like the retail industry is always rushing to play catchup. eBay says it’s time to get ahead of the curve, and to that end, they’ve created X.Commerce.

For developers, X.Commerce is the key to creating cutting-edge, apps and tools that will help people shop better, faster, and hopefully, more often.

For merchants, X.Commerce aims to be a one-stop shop for selling tools and solutions.

For marketers. . . well, it’s a little too early to tell how it will effect your job, but it’s probably going to be good.

In business there are times where you almost start to feel sorry for companies because they can’t seem to do anything right or catch any kind of break for any reason. It takes a while to get to that status though.

Very few companies are given this kind of status. No company wants it. Ones that currently come to mind are Yahoo and Aol. You almost feel bad for pointing out their screw-ups because it feels like dog piling to a degree. You can’t seem to turn around without tripping over more bad news for both of these former heavyweights.

For a while now it seems like most reports about foursquare and its number of users has been stuck in the 10 million range. That’s nothing to sneeze at for sure but one has to wonder what it will take to get the service to the next level of adoption.

The company has been expanding beyond the check-in and for good reason since those who enjoyed the “game” have quickly bored of the game. A new service offered for iOS 5 users called Radar will now tell users when they are near a place of interest that they have tagged or is part of a list of things you are following.

The foursquare blog says

Now some of the things that you would expect from Google for its Google+ social offering, like a real time search function (shouldn’t this have been there at the launch? Let’s ask Steve Yegge about Google+ to find out more ) and hashtag support are part of the service.

I could try to milk some words here for sheer SEO value with regard to real time search, social media networking and more but enough with the previews. Let’s get to Google’s star of stage and screen Vic Gundotra so he can tell you all about these changes and maybe even his cool Mercedes! Vic is the flashy Hollywood type to Yegge’s reality TV troublemaker. Gee, Google, what drama!

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