Marketing Pilgrim

Remember the days not so long ago when there would be disappointment in Google’s numbers when they they “only” had increases in revenues and profits of 40%? It was ridiculous to even think that disappointment would be associated with those numbers.

The same kind of irrational exuberance tends to follow social media growth these days as well. No one ever wants to believe anything that doesn’t indicate outrageous growth and continued upside to all things social.

Well a report conducted by the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth will certainly be a buzzkill for social media hype agents if you believe that the Fortune 500 is an indicator of just how hot something is or is not. The chart below shows that as far as Twitter goes the Fortune 500 has decided to go into a holding pattern

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A man in need of a kidney gets one. A famous movie critic regains the voice he lost. An innocent man finds refuge when snipers invade his neighborhood — all thanks to Twitter.

If you don’t already believe in the power of Twitter, you will when you read Twitter Stories. Twitter says they’re publishing these stories because showing the humanity behind the Tweets will make the world a smaller place.

That’s a little too global touchy-feely for me, but I do think that these stories are worth a look because they’re all about creativity and the “can do” spirit. They’re also mostly about marketing.

In Japan, a fishing association uses Twitter to sell the day’s catch before the boats return to port. Her Majesty, Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan used Twitter to promote her children’s book and, in turn, her culture.

So Google doesn’t have a relationship with Facebook. Now, however, they can say that they are at least indexing comments on blogs that use the Facebook commments functionality.

Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration has brought this to everyone’s attention

Googlebots, or the spiders that crawl web pages, are now reading Facebook comments on websites just like any other text content and the more interesting part is that you can also search the text of these comments using regular Google search.

The implications are obvious in that now what people are commenting on a blog (or wherever) it has the potential to now become much more public than just that blog. This will likely inspire more comment spam as well which is an unwelcome offshoot of this development. In the Internet space though that just rates another “Oh well. Time to move on. Nothing to see here.” response. It’s expected.

It is already well known that Google gets the lion’s share of online ad revenue. It’s known in that it is said often and simply assumed to be true.

Often times we need to see things in picture form and this comes to us by way of the SAI Chart of the Day and Darren Herman. A picture does say a thousand words and 46 % of online ad spend going to Google paints quite a picture, doesn’t it?

So what’s the price of being this big? A lot of scrutiny and scorn. Government concerns. Sounds like a real good time. Do you see anyone, like everyone’s “Most Likely to Succeed in Denting Google” winner Facebook, approaching this kind of market share? 46% is a huge chunk of change.

The more that is written about the world of the CMO the less attractive it seems to be. Sure it would be nice to have the big salary and the perks of being the top marketing dog but if recent research is any indication it appears as if being a CMO also means you are a bit out of the loop.

I have likened the plight of today’s CMO to that of climbing a burning rope. Most CMO’s are likely to have about 20 years or so experience before they reach the top of the food chain at a major company. That time may shorten at a smaller firm and there are those that are very young for the role as well. What has happened though is that as they climb the rope to the top of the marketing food chain many of the techniques and skills needed to get there have gone away away thus leaving them at the top with no way to get down except to fall

According to a study by IBM entitled “from Stretched to Strengthened: Insights from the Global Chief Marketing Officer there is quite dilemma facing this group as it relates to social media. emarketer presents the findings that show social media as a prime desire.

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