Marketing Pilgrim

Ten brownie points to anyone who can make up a great song about Linky Goodness!

• Don’t worry, this one has pretty pictures. You know, if regression lines and scatterplots count as pretty. Why Don’t We Read on the Web?
• Google says goodbye, you say, “Hello? What was that?” Picasa’s photo sharing service, to be discontinued on the 15th.
• Poor Stacey. Once upon a time, she had all the guys going after her. Yeah, well, you know what happens with you have a crush on every boy: “Where have all of Yahoo’s Plan Bs gone?” AOL, MySpace and possibly even Google may not be interested now that Brad Microsoft’s not.

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According to Shoemoney, SEO has no future. I do not always agree with him, but in this case, he is dead right. Let me pull on my flame retardant suit before I explain why.

First, understand that the only reason SEO has ever worked is because search engines were not advanced enough to always show relevant information. I remember when I started selling online. At the time, I had only a few competitors in my industry and it was easy to beat them in the SEO game. It took only a few metatags and such, and within weeks, I was dominant.

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It’s one of those days. Lots of news and not enough time to blog it all.

Take a look at today’s Picks and let me know what jumps out at ya.

• Inside Facebook has details of the upcoming Facebook profile redesign.
• News Corp. is backtracking on the "very agressive projections" it made for 2008.
• David Alston guests at Online Marketing Blog and shares his 10 reasons for monitoring your online reputation. So read them, then head here.
• Microsoft and Yahoo may have stolen the limelight from Google the past few months, but AP explains why Google has its groove back.

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The New York Times reported today that in an interview, Yahoo’s CEO and co-founder, Jerry Yang, claimed that Microsoft pulled it’s bid for his company after Yahoo counter offered the software giants previous bid.

This is in direct contrast to claims by Steve Ballmer and Microsoft’s advisers, that stated that the bid was pulled due to Yahoo’s unwillingness to counter, and Mr. Yang and his board’s decision to settle on a price of $37 a share their ultimate refusal to budge.

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If I had more links to share, it’d be a Pilgrim Pick-y Goodness day. But this list is only worthy of the Linky Goodness moniker.

• Don’t get me wrong. I’ll bag on Wikipedia all the live long day, but I used to be a very active editor and I still go there for lots of little factoids. But . . . why: Wikipedia Gets Published?
• Google News gets Related Searches. For kicks, I wanted to see what the related searches for “yahoo” were: online advertising, google, jerry yang, microsoft, aol, and yahoo mail.

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When it comes to marketing everyone is out to compose the most compelling message possible and then measure an audience’s reaction to that message. The question then becomes are measuring the tools that web marketers use reliable? I think the general consensus is that many of the tools that rely on JavaScript are less reliable than marketers would like them to be.

Stone Temple Consulting has performed a quality test showing that where one locates the JavaScript that our analytics tools rely on matters. The two things that the test showed were one that page load time matters and two that the amount traffic to a server can adversely affect page load time. They had to take both of these concepts into account when performing their test.

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Back in October, NBC took its popular, officially-sanctioned clips off YouTube in favor of their coming Hulu. I (and many others) derided the decision:

[I]s it really wise to pull your content from the most popular video site online to put it on your own untested, unproven and apparently behind-schedule video site? On the Internet, you have to go where the people are—it’s not an ‘if you build it, they will come’ world anymore.

So good luck with this one, NBC.

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We’ve all used Amazon before—but if you’re living in New York, a new(ish) law says you’ll have to pay New York sales taxes on purchases from the Seattle-based Internet retailer. Don’t worry, New Yorkers, you’re not the only one incensed: Amazon is already challenging the law.

Reuters reports that the new law, which Amazon believes is “unconstitutional, vague and overly broad,” dictates that any business selling goods with a presence in New York—including Internet-based affiliates living in New York—will have to pay New York sales tax. Or, as Reuters puts it:

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Today is Cinco de Mayo!

What does that mean?

Well if you’re of Mexican descent, it’s a celebration of the defeat of French forces in the Battle of Pueblo on May 5, 1862.

If you’re anyone else, it’s an excuse to simply “celebrate.”

For those of us staying sober today, here are today’s Picks:

• Europe and U.S. finally catching up with Asia when it comes to mobile TV?
• Did Google officially admit to a “minus 60″ penalty?
• If we enter a recession, marketers plan to increase spending on social networks while reduce spending on display ads.

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While Reuters and TheStreet.com are going to flood the newswires with “XXX shares plunge 20%” all day long, we wouldn’t put you through that kind of bombardment.

Instead, we’re publishing an intra-day chart of the stock price for Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. That way, you can check back here throughout the day and see which of the three companies is fairing the best.

*OK, so it’s almost live–there’s a 20 min delay in the data.

A recent article here on MarketingPilgrim, which referred to an interview with Eric Schmidt, where he basically saw Microsoft as the “evil” company the knight in shining armor (since Google’s CEO was being interviewed, I’m sure it’s clear who he sees as the “knight in shining armor”) needs to protect us from gave me the idea for today’s post

Obviously, the opinion in question is anything but objective, but it does make us wonder: who exactly is the bad guy? Given the fact that Google and Microsoft don’t exactly have a stainless track record, it’s definitely hard to tell.

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Techcrunch.com has released an email sent by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to Microsoft employees:

This afternoon I sent the attached letter to Jerry Yang announcing that Microsoft has withdrawn its proposal to acquire Yahoo. We proposed the deal in the belief that a Microsoft-Yahoo merger would create a combined company with the resources and assets to win in the fast-growing market for advertising and online services.

Ballmer spends most the email bolstering the company’s initiatives in terms of Internet advertising, and explains that the Yahoo merger was more of an accelerated means to obtain the company’s vision on the Web rather than an end all be all.

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