Introducing Marketing P...

In case you haven’t noticed the pace of Internet and social media marketing news has quickened significantly over the recent past. That signifies growth in the industry which is a very good thing. The downside, however, is that the sheer volume of news can be overwhelming even to those who are part of the industry. We hear from readers and Internet marketers in general all the time that it often feels that they are missing something in the process. Even worse, they get plenty of news but no real insights into the potential application of the news in a way that can lead to bottom line impact. That’s why we have developed Marketing Pilgrim’s Internet Marketing Insights service. We have heard these concerns and now bring you a weekly e-mail that will give you a maximum of 10 items a week that summarizes the most important news but adds the critical step of providing insights as to what the news means for businesses. Try Marketing Pilgrim’s Internet Marketing Insights service for FREE Simply sign up to let us know you are interested and we’ll send you the first week for free! Who should get this service? Here are just a few of the many folks who will benefit: Busy executives in all business disciplines Agencies SMB’s – from owners to employees Business schools & educational institutes Associations Chambers of Commerce Anyone that needs to know about internet marketing! Enough talk already. Sign up today for your free edition of Marketing Pilgrim’s Internet Marketing Insights service!

How the IPO Ruined Goog...

Editor’s Note: Ian Lurie is CEO of Portent Inc , an internet marketing agency that he founded in 1995. He co-published Web Marketing All-In-One for Dummies , where he wrote the sections on SEO, blogging, social media and web analytics. He also wrote Conversation Marketing: Internet Marketing Strategies. I’m a Google-phile. Or at least, I was. Lately, my gut’s felt a bit wobbly every time someone mentions the big G. Page, Brin and company have lost their focus. Once, they helped us all find the stuff we needed. Now, they spend their time in slap fights with Facebook. It’s almost like the Googlers are no longer in charge at Google. That’s because they’re not. The Google IPO put the company’s fate in the hands of investors. And it’s ruined the company. IPO-bashing is popular right now. But I’m not just jumping on the bandwagon here. The evidence is pretty damning: Pre-IPO, Google was laser-focused on being the best tool on earth for search-and-discovery, and they appeared unstoppable. Post-IPO, the company has lurched from one social media debacle to another. Google’s total victory Google owns search. According to Search Engine Land, Bing still only holds 15% market share. Google? 66%. That’s a mind-boggling lead when you consider the money Microsoft has poured into promoting their search engine. Put an average apartment complex next to the Empire State Building. That’s the difference between Bing and Google. Google has the closest thing to total victory they’re likely to get. The also-rans don’t compete with them—they compete with each other. And everyone’s an also-ran. How Google makes money Google makes its money with their pay-per-click network, Google Adwords. Advertisers purchase clicks, one click at a time, in a modified, keyword-based auction. The Adwords model is brilliant. Correctly implemented, it’s a money-generating machine for everyone involved, including Google. In 2011, Adwords accounted for at least 95% of the company’s income. But it has its limits: In an Adwords model, clicks are your inventory. When you run out of inventory, your revenue stops growing. That’s OK. You can make incremental gains by getting more clicks, and you can get more clicks with better, more ubiquitous search tools. The IPO trap But post-IPO, incremental revenue growth isn’t enough. Stock prices are emotional, and incremental isn’t exciting. If you want shareholders to love you, you have to make them a lot of money. That means dramatically outperforming last quarter’s numbers. In 2011, Google earned $103 million per day. That’s a staggering amount, particularly if you’ve got shareholders clamoring for you to crush your past numbers. To do so, Google will have to find an entire new line of business: A new source of advertising revenue to match Adwords. Or, they’ll have to find a massive new venue in which to place Adwords. Ironically, Google’s penalized by their success: They’re so dominant in search that they must go far, far outside their expertise to maintain their share price. IPOs force a company to forever outperform past results, no matter how miraculous. That’s where Google is, right now: Pushed to surpass total victory in their space, they have to move on to an entirely different one. Suspicious timing Google didn’t attempt to create their own social network until Orkut. That was early 2004, just before they filed for their IPO. At that point, the pressure was already building to find a new way to generate shareholder value. How’d Orkut do? Do you remember it? Didn’t think so. Sidewiki? Failed. Friend Connect? Gone. Google Wave didn’t even get past testing. Now we’ve got Google Plus, which is showing some of the worst engagement numbers of any major social media site. Success is beside the point I think Google Plus has a lot of strengths. It could succeed. But even if it does, the social media red herring so distracts Google from search that the giant will become vulnerable, for the first time. And understand: Search generates Google’s dramatic revenue numbers. Not social media. And make no mistake: Google’s work in social is compromising their search supremacy: They’ve ended their ‘firehose’ agreement with Twitter. That agreement allowed them to deliver near-real-time results from one of the internet’s biggest social networks. Now, they don’t get instant access to Twitter posts. In addition, Google’s started showing Plus posts in search results. That works if Google Plus reaches critical mass, where most Google users are also Plus users. But that’s not currently the case. By stuffing Google Plus posts into search results and excluding Twitter/Facebook results, they’re cutting off two huge content sets, and replacing them with a smaller, less relevant one. That is not good for the relevance of their results. So, even if Google Plus survives and grows, it’s unlikely the benefits to Google will outweigh the costs. And Google wouldn’t be doing this, I think, if not for their shareholders. What’s next? Google is now beholden to shareholders. They can’t change that. What they can do is stop pandering, and start leveraging their greatest strengths: They own two of the largest search engines in the world: Google and YouTube. They know more about information discovery than any of their competitors. They have a dominant e-mail toolset in GMail. They have the biggest information corpus in the world. They have a mountain of cash. It’ll be hard to do. Shareholders get excited about social media, not about a better search tool. But for shareholders and Googlers alike, real success will come from strong, sustainable growth. And that depends more on growing their strengths than struggling against their weaknesses.

Sure Pinterest is Hot, ...

Is Pinterest the next Facebook? Fortune magazine is asking the question in their April issue, but they’re not the first one’s to consider it. The graphically-oriented social media site is gaining popularity faster than a studio-made teen idol. People, particularly young women, are signing up in droves and if we could hear them, they’d probably be shrieking with joy. Here are a few comments from Twitter: people ask me how I know @ pinterest is here to stay…I think – I’m having a bad night and Ill want to do is go pin/look at pins Wife occupied for hours while I watch basketball. Thank you Pinterest …whatever you are. And not complementary but says it: It’s not until you click into the “Popular” section that you glimpse the Winnie The Pooh sweatshirt-wearing nightmare that is @ pinterest . Pinterest is the internet version of a box of chocolates. Got that. But is it powerful enough to become the next Facebook? Look at these numbers from comScore: Pinterest is rising fast, but popularity comes with a set of unique problems. One is capacity. Keeping the servers up during a sudden, unexpected traffic deluge can be tricky. People will only stand for so many outages before they say good-bye. Next, there are the legal issues. Pinterests entire business is based on people posting photos they don’t own. It’s not a photo hosting site like Flickr. It’s a virtual scrapbook and some content owners don’t like it. Mostly, there’s the novelty factor. Right now, Pinterest is a fun, new place to play. It doesn’t take much effort to pin a photo and even less to repin. Tumblr has a similar system, but their site is still more about photo-blogging. Pinterest is more like taking a stroll through a museum. There are no games. There are no rewards. There’s limited text space and it’s not really informative. As much as I dislike Facebook, I learn something about somebody every time I visit. When I visit Pinterest, I get overwhelmed by the clutter.  It’s hoarder heaven. I’m sure the site will grow and change with time. Eventually, the rise in traffic will cease and as with all social media sites, it will have a loyal core audience sitting on top of 1,000′s of abandoned accounts. Will Pinterest become the next Facebook? I say the next Twitter but Facebook has nothing to worry about. Do you pin? Marketing Pilgrim’s Social Channel is proudly sponsored by Full Sail University, where you can earn your Masters of Science Degree in Internet Marketing in less than 2 years. Visit FullSail.edu for more information. Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

Social Nudges Viewers t...

I love television. That’s not new news to anyone who regularly reads my work. I routinely record up to 4 hours of TV a night, that I can watch back in under 3 hours by skipping commercials, intros and the boring parts. Here’s something that is new  news. Thanks to social apps, I now watch more live TV than ever before. For example, last night American Idol was on. Instead of sending it straight to the DVR, I watched live because of app called Viggle. Viggle rewards me with points for watching and more points if I watch live because then I can play their real-time trivia game. They even give me extra points if I stick around for the commercials and prove it by answering questions after the show. There were moments when I wondered why I was bothering. Why I was sitting through five minutes of car commercials just to earn 15 points toward an iTunes gift card? But sit I did, and I was annoyed when I had to stop watching early because of another commitment. A potential 40 points lost! This may sound crazy, but I am not alone in this. A new iModerate Research Technologies study shows that 58% of heavy social media users are watching more live TV. (I can hear the studio execs cheering from here.) The respondents said that interacting through a social app made watching TV more entertaining. They also liked the feeling of being part of a group and virtually hanging out with friends. Social TV app GetGlue offers stickers for rewards and chatter when you check-in, but no incentive to stay with a program beyond that. Viggle and Peel both keep viewers engaged by using an audio sync to determine what they’re watching and to deliver timed messages. Miso doesn’t use audio sync, but they serve up timed slideshows designed to keep the viewer engaged throughout the length of the program as well. Social plus Gaming plus Technology equals a win. If social apps can make people watch TV commercials, then you gotta wonder what else it can do. Marketing Pilgrim’s Social Channel is proudly sponsored by Full Sail University, where you can earn your Masters of Science Degree in Internet Marketing in less than 2 years. Visit FullSail.edu for more information. Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community

Social Nudges Viewers t...

I love television. That’s not new news to anyone who regularly reads my work. I routinely record up to 4 hours of TV a night, that I can watch back in under 3 hours by skipping commercials, intros and the boring parts. Here’s something that is new  news. Thanks to social apps, I now watch more live TV than ever before. For example, last night American Idol was on. Instead of sending it straight to the DVR, I watched live because of app called Viggle. Viggle rewards me with points for watching and more points if I watch live because then I can play their real-time trivia game. They even give me extra points if I stick around for the commercials and prove it by answering questions after the show. There were moments when I wondered why I was bothering. Why I was sitting through five minutes of car commercials just to earn 15 points toward an iTunes gift card? But sit I did, and I was annoyed when I had to stop watching early because of another commitment. A potential 40 points lost! This may sound crazy, but I am not alone in this. A new iModerate Research Technologies study shows that 58% of heavy social media users are watching more live TV. (I can hear the studio execs cheering from here.) The respondents said that interacting through a social app made watching TV more entertaining. They also liked the feeling of being part of a group and virtually hanging out with friends. Social TV app GetGlue offers stickers for rewards and chatter when you check-in, but no incentive to stay with a program beyond that. Viggle and Peel both keep viewers engaged by using an audio sync to determine what they’re watching and to deliver timed messages. Miso doesn’t use audio sync, but they serve up timed slideshows designed to keep the viewer engaged throughout the length of the program as well. Social plus Gaming plus Technology equals a win. If social apps can make people watch TV commercials, then you gotta wonder what else it can do. Marketing Pilgrim’s Social Channel is proudly sponsored by Full Sail University, where you can earn your Masters of Science Degree in Internet Marketing in less than 2 years. Visit FullSail.edu for more information. Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community