Marketing Pilgrim Published: “Microsoft Filing Formal Complaint in Europe Against Google” plus 6 more

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Microsoft Filing Formal Complaint in Europe Against Google
The Other Kansas City Chosen From 1,100 Towns for Google’s Ultra High Speed Broadband Project
Affiliate Summit Meetup Day
Nearly Half of All Mobile Users Use Their Phone to Shop
Marketing Lessons from the BronxZoosCobra
Social Irony: FTC Rules on Buzz Privacy Stampede
Google’s +1 Takes Another Swing At Social

Microsoft Filing Formal Complaint in Europe Against Google

Posted: 31 Mar 2011 05:02 AM PDT

Microsoft announced yesterday that all of its talk in Europe about unfair competition in search through various puppets (sites like which Microsoft owns part of and other whiners like Foundem who wouldn't know what SEO was if it smacked them in the server) will now result in a formal complaint against Google.

cnet News reports

In a somewhat ironic twist, Microsoft said this evening it will file a formal complaint against Google tomorrow with European antitrust regulators.

Microsoft, which itself has been the subject of several antitrust probes in the United States and abroad, argues Google is engaging in anticompetitive behavior in search, online advertising, and smartphone software, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith wrote in a blog explaining the action.

The interesting thing is that this action will go beyond Google's search business as Microsoft feels that Google is preventing them from competing with Windows Phone because certain permissions for YouTube to work like it does on Android and iPhone devices are not in place. Honestly, what sense would it make for Google to make YouTube less accessible on Windows Phone? I'm just asking because it seems silly to imagine a plot to keep the 10 Windows Phone users from getting to ther favorite YouTube videos and ads.

Microsoft's blog post says a little more and starts off with a ridiculous attempt to sound like they respect Google.

At the outset, we should be among the first to compliment Google for its genuine innovations, of which there have been many over the past decade. As the only viable search competitor to Google in the U.S. and much of Europe, we respect their engineering prowess and competitive drive. Google has done much to advance its laudable mission to "organize the world's information," but we're concerned by a broadening pattern of conduct aimed at stopping anyone else from creating a competitive alternative.

OK, this ‘statement’ is a doozy. Mr. Smith seems to be confused because the reality is that Google has this much market share because Bing hasn't been a truly viable competitor anywhere……yet. He writes this as if Google and Bing are neck and neck. Apparently Mr. Smith and Microsoft have active imaginations.

In the end, this is just Microsoft's way of trying to throw a stick in Google's spokes. What will determine how much trouble this creates is just how intense the European Commission's scrutiny becomes and how much they want to get in Google's way. Unfortunately for Google, the system in Europe seems to give governing bodies an inordinate amount of power in the name of protecting the poor Europeans who can't think for themselves (which I say in jest because I know that most people in Europe, like here in the US, are more than capable of making their own decisions without anyone telling them what they should decide).

One last thought on this. The Microsoft post goes on to say

At Microsoft we've shown that we're prepared to work hard and invest literally billions of dollars annually to offer Bing, a search service that many now regard as the most innovative available. But, hard work and innovation need a fair and competitive marketplace in which to thrive, and twice the Department of Justice has intervened to thwart Google's unlawful conduct from impeding fair competition.

That's all well and good but the "build it, do a big advertising push and they will come" approach which Bing has been using is much more to blame for Bing's difficulties in the search space. There are many, many, many holes in Google's approach to search and the marketplace that would allow for Bing to make real inroads against Google but at least until now they haven't even tried to truly outsmart Google. They have tried to out engineer and out advertise them which is not how they will win.

Until Bing and Microsoft see that there is nothing that Google is doing to 'block' their competitive opportunity but rather they are choosing to go through all the wrong rabbit holes, this competitive situation will remain the same. You can be as innovative as you want and get all the platitudes from the high tech 'in-crowd' but unless you take the message to the street and work with the majority of people who just want to search for something and get a good answer, they will still do what they have become accustomed to which is to use Google almost instinctually.

So we start another legal wrestling match to work out something that is likely more perception than reality and there will be plenty of wasted cycles following this whole process. In the end, if Microsoft needs to play legal games to slow down Google rather than just out doing them in the many areas where Google obviously fails then maybe Bing and Microsoft aren't the real competitors to Google after all. Legal actions in business are only as effective as the group in office that supports them and they can change as quickly as they are established.

Does that sound like a business plan to you?

The Other Kansas City Chosen From 1,100 Towns for Google’s Ultra High Speed Broadband Project

Posted: 31 Mar 2011 04:16 AM PDT

Google announced over a year ago that it was looking to bring ultra high speed broadband Internet connectivity to the world but they were going to start with one town first. The original blog post suggested that this town would be rural but according to the announcement yesterday that rural town happens to also conveniently be adjacent to and share the name of an NFL city, as Kansas City, KS won the great fiber race. Gee, I wonder why they might have done this (confusion over the name, more press etc. etc). Sneaky but effective.

Here is a video from Google’s blog explaining why they chose the Midwestern city over the rest.

Some of the areas that expressed their "Aw, shucks it wasn't us!" sentiment were Baltimore, Durham, NC and many others.

It will be interesting to watch this experiment unfold over the next year or so with the focus being on the real story from the city's residents and not the spin from Google.

We'll keep an eye on it and we'll see just how many people think Google is making this grand gesture for Kansas City, MO (the big city that everyone knows). I have to admit that it's a pretty sly move although I suspect that Google would never admit that this name game had anything to do with their choice.

Any thoughts?

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Affiliate Summit Meetup Day

Posted: 30 Mar 2011 09:10 PM PDT

Recently, I attended the first ever Affiliate Summit Meetup Day. Affiliate Summit recently launched a nation wide circuit of meetups to bring affiliate marketers together in local networking and learning groups.

The meetups are currently held in Orlando, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Denver, Baltimore, Melbourne, Indianapolis, Salt Lake City and my home-town, Austin. The Austin meetup, featured a presentation by Shawn Collins (@affiliatetip) entitled “Affiliate Marketing for Newbies”. In the presentation Shawn laid out seven things you should focus on when building a new affiliate website.

Picking a Topic

Shawn recommended that you pick a topic you’re passionate about. He warned that picking “Flavor of the Day” topics for your site in response to Internet trends can lead to a faltering commitment on your part. Stick with things you’re passionate about and you’ll be more likely to dedicate the time and energy you’ll need to in order to be successful.

Find Your Voice

When picking your writing style, Shawn advised to use your own voice. Don’t try to be an award winning journalist. You’re you, write like it. He also advocated the use of editorial calendars so you’ll have a clear plan about the type of content you’re going to create. This can avoid time wasted on aimlessly wondering about what you’re going to write about next.

Choosing a Domain Name

So you’ve been pouring over your domain tool for days with your thesaurus frayed at the edges trying to come up with the perfect domain. Oops. According to Shawn, you should be spending no more than 20 minutes picking the domain name. With Matt Cutts coming out and saying that keywords in the domain will be “less helpful” in the future, this advice holds some weight.

I personally like to do a US trademark search when I’m picking a domain name, just to see if I can avoid any trademark entanglements down the road.

Hosting

Shawn gave a plug for his favorite shared hosting provider BlueHost and his favorite dedicated server host Liquid Web. Everyone has their favorite hosts, but I’m sure Shawn has some interesting battle stories that led him to these recommendations.

Email Service

Driving customers to his websites isn’t good enough for Shawn. He’s a fan of promoting and sending out newsletters to website visitors. His service-of-choice for automatically generating newsletters from website content is Aweber.

Patience

Affiliate marketing can be a bit of a waiting game, which is why Shawn stressed this point most of all. He reminded everyone to build content first and not focus on monetizing right away.

When picking ads, pick the ads that are most relevant and not the most lucrative. If you have a site about German Sheppards you probably don’t need that weight loss offer do you?

In addition to picking the right offers to run on your site, Shawn said to test, test test and not to expect to earn money from your site for months. As with most things in life, being successful at affiliate marketing takes hard work and patience.

Where to Find Affiliate Programs

Shawn’s main advice here was to Google the keywords covering the topic of your site and add the word “affiliate program”. In addition to this, publishers often use affiliate network listings, directories, conferences and a whole host of other methods to find affiliate offers in their niche.

About the Austin Meetup

The crowd at the Austin meetup was a healthy mix of affiliate marketers, affiliate advertisers and all around online marketing geeks. Brett Tabke was in attendance and even jumped in to help shed some light on a few SEO questions from the audience.

With such a vibrant meetup community in Austin, the bar was high for Affiliate Summit’s first Meetup Day, but the organization was good and the audience was smart and interactive.

How about you? Did you go to Affiliate Summit Meetup Day in another city? Comment below and let me know how it went

Nearly Half of All Mobile Users Use Their Phone to Shop

Posted: 30 Mar 2011 02:42 PM PDT

While 89.7 percent of the U.S. population aged 18 to 64 have mobile phones, only 49.1 percent are using their phones to shop.

That fact comes from a recent study conducted by Arc Worldwide that was reported on by Reuters. They took a close look at the behaviors of 1,800 mobile shoppers and found that 80% of them fell into the “light” category leaving 20% on the heavy side.

Here’s the graphic from Reuters that explains it all.

Not surprisingly, the iPhone was the preferred phone for mobile shopping and the heaviest shoppers are younger people who tend to be “in the know.” It is surprising to see that men are the heaviest mobile shoppers. That could be because they don’t see shopping as a fun activity as many women do, so they just want to get what they need and be done with it.

What really surprised me is how low “looking for coupons” fell in the activity hierarchy. So many surveys preach that people use mobile for deals, deals, deals, but it looks like solid information is more important.

To go along with that, the survey also states that 51% of shoppers are more likely to buy from a mobile-specific site but only 4.8% of retailers have them. That’s a huge gap that is going to have to change if retailers want to survive going forward.

Right now, it’s easy to say that a mobile version of a retail website is catering to that small 20% of heavy users, but this could be very chicken or the egg. Those light users might become heavy users if mobile shopping was a cleaner experience, like you get with a mobile-specific app.

Molly Garris, digital strategy manager at Arc Worldwide says,

“If these light mobile shoppers really start engaging and evolve into heavier mobile shoppers, that’s going to increase the mobile shopping population by 50 percent.”

Certainly, offering customers the option is not going to hurt sales, so really there’s no reason to not develop a mobile site. Except perhaps that doing so costs time and money and those are real concerns, especially for the small business owner.

If you’re in the retail business, does your company have a mobile version of your website for cell phone shoppers? We’d like to hear about it.

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Marketing Lessons from the BronxZoosCobra

Posted: 30 Mar 2011 01:43 PM PDT

On Monday, a cobra engineered a jail break at the Bronx Zoo and became an instant celebrity when he started a Twitter account to document his freedom flight.

That may sound like the plot of the latest Pixar animal adventure, but it’s actually a true story — to some extent. (Says the Cobra: I want to thank those animals from the movie “Madagascar.” They were a real inspiration.)

The cobra really did escape, though zookeepers say they’re confident the critter didn’t leave the creepy confines of the reptile house. And someone or something did begin Twittering. “The Wall Street Journal” says that the owner of the Twitter account can’t be the snake because snakes can’t type. But I say, they have fangs and a tail, either of which could be used to pound out the messages, though I’m not sure where they’d keep their iPhone while on the prowl.

The twitter account @bronxzooscobra, has grown faster than a hungry snake in a box full of mice. To date, it has 157,620 followers (he only follows the Bronx Zoo’s Twitter) and has sparked a media frenzy.

Savvy marketers have already jumped on the trend like Venom Energy Drink who is offering a year’s supply of their product to the zookeeper who finds the cobra. (Tiger’s Blood is so last month.) But it’s the cobra himself who is doing an excellent job promoting businesses and tourism in the city. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Ellis Island saw a sudden bump in attendance after the cobra told of his adventures there. He even gave some love to Broadway, a karaoke bar and a local bakery.

If this Twitter isn’t being handled by a guy in PR, then some firm should hire him because he’s a genius.

The popularity of the Bronx Zoo’s Cobra goes to show you how little it takes to become a media celeb. Whoever is running this account is doing it with no money invested and not that much time. They simply found a trend and ran with it. I’m sure they had no idea that it would turn into the darling that it has.

Here’s one of my favorites:

This guy needs his own one-creature show, either that or a desk on late night TV.

Social Irony: FTC Rules on Buzz Privacy Stampede

Posted: 30 Mar 2011 01:05 PM PDT

On the same day that Google has announced it is rolling out it's version of the Facebook Like button called +1, the FTC has given its 'ruling' on another social endeavor by Google.

You remember Buzz right? The thing that sits in your inbox and attracts followers from parts unknown and relationships unknown? Back when it was introduced there was quite a stir caused because Google thought it correct to simply put everyone's e-mail lists out to the general public to share. Hey why not? We're in the Age of Openness, right? Well, the reaction was swift and it caught the attention of the FTC and it was just one year ago to the day that we reported on the FTC's interest in Google's privacy practices which led to a reversal of practice by Google.

Well, today they finally felt the sting of a stern talking down by the FTC. Nothing more, nothing less. In other words, there will be no fines but there will be requirements for Google to follow. As TechCrunch reports

Jon Leibowitz, Chairman of the FTC said in the release: "This is a tough settlement that ensures that Google will honor its commitments to consumers and build strong privacy protections into all of its operations."

The settlement bars the search giant from future privacy misrepresentations, requires it to implement a comprehensive privacy program, and calls for regular, independent privacy audits by independent third parties for the next 20 years. The charge also requires Google to obtain users' consent before sharing their information with third parties. And the FTC says this is the first time in history where a settlement has required a company to conduct a privacy program of this kind.

What did Google have to say? In their blog they stated

User trust really matters to Google. That's why we try to be clear about what data we collect and how we use it—and to give people real control over the information they share with us.

That said, we don't always get everything right. The launch of Google Buzz fell short of our usual standards for transparency and user control—letting our users and Google down. While we worked quickly to make improvements, regulators—including the U.S. Federal Trade Commission—unsurprisingly wanted more detail about what went wrong and how we could prevent it from happening again. Today, we've reached an agreement with the FTC to address their concerns.

And finally the big moment. The Google mea culpa.

We'd like to apologize again for the mistakes we made with Buzz. While today's announcement thankfully put this incident behind us, we are 100 percent focused on ensuring that our new privacy procedures effectively protect the interests of all our users going forward.

So on the same day that Google's +1 grabs the headlines a rather dark chapter in the history of Google's social networking attempts can be closed. Now you have to wonder when Buzz itself will be shuttered.

Do you use Buzz? Would you care or even know if it went away?

Google’s +1 Takes Another Swing At Social

Posted: 30 Mar 2011 12:12 PM PDT

Google is beginning to roll out another social offering that is tied to the search mothership (and the ads displayed on it as well ). But I will be honest. After doing some research as to what others were saying about +1 in addition to what Google says about it, I am at the point where my hair hurts. Let's start with the obligatory Google nod at marketing called the cute video intro on the Google blog of (insert service name here).

The blog post goes into tremendous detail of what +1 will do and it should rank number one for the term "+1" because it's mentioned 15 times in the post (my count at least).

Here's my question to our readers though. How many of you have the same group of friends or social connections in your Google profile as you do in Facebook Twitter or anywhere else? I ask because the key to this becoming truly social is how many people will see your +1's (which is now Google's Like or retweet equivalent). Those would be the people in your Google social network which, until today at least, has been an oxymoron.

According to Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land

Let's talk about your +1 social network now. When you enable +1, it will be made up of:

People in your Gmail & Google Talk chat list
People in your "My Contacts" group in Google Contacts
People you follow in Google Reader or Google Buzz

What's missing are people you are connected to via non-Google services, such as Twitter, Flickr or Quora. That's something that will come in the future, Google says.

Indeed, we know that there are some "hidden" options that were added to Google Profiles recently, allowing you to connect those profiles to other social networking accounts. It could be that these will be enabled soon, as part of the +1 rollout.

Sullivan then goes on to explain how you have another social network from Google's Social Search which is still separate from the +1 group. Honestly, it's like a social clusterplusone. Then Danny, bless his heart, gives the whole Google social picture in painstaking detail which only served to confuse me more even though I know that what he wrote is spot on (it almost always is). I just don’t see how these can all run concurrently (+1, Social Search, Buzz) and the average person can make any sense of it. Is it so much to ask for Google to produce something that could be understood easily by the vast majority of people who use search engines which are just regular folks looking for some information rather than a spider web of social starts and stops?

In the end, I am going to wait to see exactly what +1 does and who it does it to before I say anything else. If you would like to join the experiment you can do so here.

Can you explain +1 in a succinct sentence? Let's see your attempts in the comments. I sure could use them.