Marketing Pilgrim

CNET’s Stephen Shankland brought us an interesting article today on the projections of search advertising spend.

Many have speculated that the weakened economic state could be a boon to the Internet sector, as businesses look for more cost effective marketing, and consumers look for better prices on goods.

However some analysts disagree.

Cowen analysts Jim Friedland and Kevin Kopelman stated:

“We are lowering our estimates on Google, Yahoo, Amazon, VistaPrint, eHealth, Blue Nile, and Gmarket to reflect: (1) a weaker macro outlook exacerbated by the bank crisis; (2) the rapid rise in the dollar over the past two months; and (3) the impact of the (0.5 percent) rate cut on interest income. We continue to believe that paid search-ad budgets will remain intact, based on our previously published analysis on the historical experience of direct-mail budgets during recessions. However, we think the growth of paid-search budgets–and therefore Google’s revenues–will be lower than expected, as smaller overall ad budgets will limit the ability of advertisers to meaningfully increase search spend. We also believe that display advertising could experience negative growth (we are projecting mid-single-digit growth in 2009), which would weigh heavily on Yahoo.”

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A new report from Universal McCann, one of the world’s largest media service firms, looks at how Internet based commentary is an increasingly powerful force.

Blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed, Fecebook, and other forms of social media are not only shaping thoughts, they are also shapping where dollars are spent through reviews and product descriptions.

According to the report the growth in social media and consumer opinion online has leveled the playing field in sectors where expertise has traditionally been key to purchase decisions such as finance, the advice of total strangers is being increasingly trusted.

The report, When Did We Start Trusting Strangers? , is based on a survey of 17,000 Internet users in 29 countries and examines the growth of consumer recommendation and the tools that drive it across the globe.

The report calls this new social media an “Influence Economy”

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Google and NBC Universal announced a partnership yesterday that would help form a strategic multi-year advertising, research and technology partnership.

The announcement was made on Monday by Mike Pilot, President, NBC Universal Sales and Marketing and Tim Armstrong, Google’s President of Advertising and Commerce, North America.

The two said their respective companies will work together to create more effective advertising metrics, attract non-traditional advertisers to NBC Universal, and incorporate Google’s ever popular “self-service buying opportunities through the Google TV Ads advertising platform.”

Google’s TV Ads platform will be offered on  Sci Fi, Oxygen, MSNBC, CNBC, Sleuth, and Chiller.

“We’re extremely pleased to join forces with Google on this effort, which will help us develop better accountability and ROI metrics for our advertisers and attract an entirely new group of clients to television advertising,” said Pilot. “This is another step in our commitment to trying innovative advertising approaches and testing new technologies that can help benefit our clients.”

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I am a FriendFeed fan boy.

That is saying a lot, because I am usually pretty critical of everything.

The platform is easy to use, and makes the first real concentrated effort towards making a single platform for all social media.

One of the main uses I see for FriendFeed is as a reputation monitoring and management tool.

Here are five ways to utilize the service for rep management and monitoring:

1) Establishing a Network – I am a huge proponent of reputation of management through preemptive means. By creating lasting relationships with market publishers and thought leaders you can more easily build your brand, and protect it. FriendFeed gives you a tool to effectively communicate your social media efforts en total with these contacts. It also allows you directly communicate through the feed itself using its “share something” feature, which is a form of micro-blogging.

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The official Microsoft adCenter blog announced the beta testing of a desktop utility for their paid search platform.

For paid search managers, this software will function much like Google’s Adwords desktop application.

Basically you will be able to manage your adCenter campaigns from the convenience of your desktop without the use of a browser. The positives of software like this are numerous. The most obvious is that it allows you to make wholesale edits and revisions without worrying about the real time implications on your account. Such software also makes the initial process of paid search account setup much easier.

According to the blog teh adCenter application allows:

Quickly navigate through multiple accounts

Copy and paste keywords, negative keywords, match types and bid amounts from the adCenter Add-in for Excel into the Desktop application

Bulk edit multiple items at once (bid prices, destination URLs, ad group targeting, etc.) —within or across groups of items

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This must have been a tough one for the search giant to figure out.

People read numbers better than they do colors.

Google has started to add Approximate word counts on their Adwords keyword tool, along side of their vague colored bar graphs, which used to be the only data they gave.

The reason behind these moves by the big G, or small g or whatever they are being called this week, is likely their realization that the future of paid search is in the small business. SMBs love freebies, and anything that can help them minimize how far they have to spread their marketing dollar.

Microsoft has been making a strong push in ‘08 to improve their paid search service, at least in terms of user side services and tools. I doubt that factored into Google’s decision to spruce up this service, but no matter what it shows that both search engines realize non-agency advertisers are going to be of growing importance.

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Vivisimo, an enterprise search company based in Pennsylvania, announced Thursday that it has expanded its search affiliate program, which offers a free search engine for all government Web sites.

This search platform indexes more than 50 million government documents.

The platform covers news, images, frequently asked questions, maps, and weather forecasts. Searchers can also find government contact information, applications, and notices regarding jobs and benefits. Managers of web sites related to the government can add new features to their sites and even ambiguous search terms will extract useful information, Vivisimo said.

“Using Vivisimo’s superior search technology, and the expanded search affiliate program, anybody can easily access the vast amounts of information collected and generated by the U.S. government,” Raul Valdes-Perez, CEO and co-founder of Vivisimo, said in an announcement. “Vivisimo’s intuitive user-interface turns complexity into simplicity — and will help millions of people to get quick, authoritative answers to their questions.”

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Today Google launched Google Trends for Websites.

This is the search giants first foray into competitive research, and comparisons are being drawn to Alexa and Quantacast.

Barry Schwartz points out a good use for the new tool at SearchEngineLand.com:

Now, if you think like a link builder – you can use this tool to find sites that are within your “neighborhood” or industry. So if I want to find link partners for the Search Engine Roundtable, I enter in seroundtable.com, look at the related sites and ask all of them for links. Then I go to all of those sites and see who is related to them. You can, theoretically, keep expanding that list, as far is it makes sense.

Some think that the tool is a misuse of Google’s data, sighting the ability for anyone to gain a new competitive edge. This of course was possible before, when for a fee you could snoop out information on your competitors via Hitwise and Comscore.

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Even if you don’t know who Michael D. Jensen is, chances are if you use Twitter you know of one of his apps.

For the last months Jensen has become one of the premier Twitter App developers, creating applications that utilize the Twitter API in fresh and creative ways.

According to Jensen it began with a Tweet from Lee Odden:

@mdjensen some of these tools remind me of what you made for MyBlogLog. Any chance you’ll get into the Twitter tools game?

And from there he has had the Twitter application development fever.

TweetBeep – Launched May 6, 2008

TweetBeep is allows you to receive alerts when various key terms you enter are mentioned on Twitter. You can receive an email when someone is twittering about you, your company, your product, or your website. This is obviously a great reputation management tool, especially as Twitter grows in relevance among the everyday social media user.

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A post at TechCrunch today boasts that Wikia is “beginning to suck a lot less.”

The wiki based search product is supposedly stepping up its game through the implementation of editing features that lets searchers reorder, add, remove, rate, annotate, and comment on results.

These new features make the system harder to gain, and spammers easier to oust.

Jimmy Wales admitted to the lack of quality his site has shown and stated that it:

Pretty much sucked. It has not been usable on a day to day basis.

The thing that really strikes me about Wikia.com is that the top result for every search is a Wikipedia entry. As search marketers know the first listing garners over 40% of the overall search traffic for a term. Doesn’t this make Wikia.com feel like a Wikipedia search engine, more than a wiki based search engine?

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The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) recently set their “Interactive Campaign Setup Best Practices,” out on the world.

For those of you not familiar with the IAB, their site’s about page defines them as:

Founded in 1996, the Interactive Advertising Bureau represents over 375 leading interactive companies that actively engage in and support the sale of interactive advertising. IAB members are responsible for selling over 86% of online advertising in the United States. On behalf of its members, the IAB is dedicated to the continuing growth of the interactive advertising marketplace, of interactive’s share of total marketing spend, and of its members’ share of total marketing spend. The IAB evaluates and recommends standards and practices, fields interactive effectiveness research, and educates marketers, agencies, and media companies, as well as the wider business community, about the value of interactive advertising.

Their about page goes on to state their six core objectives as being:

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The local search property, Citysearch.com, is coming under fire for its lack of a click fraud system.

According to a lawsuit filed yesterday in Los Angeles Superior Court, Citysearch.com is defrauding its advertising customers by not only turning a blind eye to click fraud, but the lawsuit states they are actually encouraging it.

“Most click fraud cases involve companies that simply turn a blind eye to it,” said the victims’ attorney, Brian S. Kabateck, Managing Partner of Kabateck Brown Kellner. “Citysearch does this too, since it has no real program to prevent click fraud. But Citysearch goes beyond indifference to actively incentivizing click fraud. Citysearch’s motive is simple: clicks equal cash, whether they’re fraudulent or not.”

You may remember Kabateck from other paid search cases, including winning a multi-million dollar settlement from Yahoo! and playing a part in a $90 million settlement from Google on behalf of advertisers who were victimized by click fraud.

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