To my dear readers, sorry about being out for a while. Really, I’m sorry.

We had tons of news over this time. Tiger Woods became a prime time mess, a marketing disaster of major proportions and a big comics’ tool. There was a so called bombing attempt on Xmas in the US and flying has become every travelers’ biggest nightmare. Oprah is retiring… in a couple of years and to her own channel (is it really retiring?). The Sci Fi channel became Sy-Fy and even though everyone blasted their marketing department for that, the Sy-Fy channel has reported and claimed success… interesting stuff.

In the online marketing world we’ve had even more news than that. Google applied for a license to buy and sell energy, launched the first “superphone” the Google Nexus One, changed the URL display guidelines and got some feathers ruffled with some over the moon charges for canceling the Nexus One contract with T-Mobile. China has become an international mess with Google and things keep getting worse (now after Google apparently got hacked by Chinese hackers). Bing still lags in functionality and even Chris Brogan has begun a quest to try Bing or die in 30 days.

I have tried Bing, I still give it a chance every now and then, but frankly, even though it has some nice features, the results (the main reason for a search engine to exist) are at best, buggy. Most of Bing’s results are either obvious or completely off the mark. Chris Brogan, a well known blogger, social media expert and internet marketer found out that when typing his name in the search, Chris Brown (you know who) showed up. THAT is buggy as a simple comparison of word by word should give the crawler the obvious results, everything related to the people with the same name. The same test with my name yields equally disappointing results. Now, getting indexed by Bing (regular business sites or any kind of site) is quite the adventure. There is an extremely long and useless thread in Bing about this particular issue.

Anywho, getting back to the original subject, there have been many news and many changes. I kept myself off the predictions bus but here are my two cents:

• The world will continue the great migration online
• Cellphones (smartphones, superphones) will be much more important
• Big growth in mobile marketing or mobile-friendly marketing
• The world economies will continue to be a mess, but will probably get better
• Bing will continue to struggle until everybody realizes its just Live with a different name and more images
• Google will continue its path towards world domination
• China and Google will continue on bad terms
• Brasil will be a dominant team in the world cup (if they don’t win it again)
• Canada will be big on the Winter Olympics (specially the hockey teams)
• Yahoo will continue in its nice quiet little place… or maybe not?

That is as far as my crystal ball (or Liquid Crystal Display screen) allows me to see. There is something very certain about it, that no matter what, I’ll continue to write about it all and probably, hopefully, just maybe, someone will care and eventually read my stuff and find it at least entertaining.

On a side note, Search Engine Optimization is going to get much more complicated with all the changes Google and Bing are implementing. The content will continue to be king and writers will continue to prosper in this online jungle, or as I like to call it, this Online Wild West. Has anyone checked out the Tweets on Google searches? Pretty cool right?

Ma Cualli Ohtli!

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

Bing Tweets - Twitter to show in Bing

Direct from Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, we receive news of the future in search. What is being called “real time search” which involves using data from Twitter, facebook and similar services to include information currently surging about a search. In this regard, Bing has taken a big step forward by securing a deal with Twitter to include Tweets in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

There is also a deal with Facebook, but details about this have not been provided.

Want to see the beta? See it here.

This change in search will mean that using social media will become more important than ever. You will be able to see twitter feeds related to a link directly from the search without having to visit the social site to get the details. This adds a new perspective as people will be actually talking live about a subject and those comments will be shown in real time while you search.

For marketing this has many implications, simply starting from developing new ways of promoting a service and the fact that exposure to bad press will be more than an uncomfortable reality. Companies who don’t take care of their clients or have disgruntled customers will now be exposed live and online.

We can easily imagine coming out of a retail store where we dealt with a more than unfriendly salesperson, pulling out the phone and immediately tweeting about the bad experience to let the world know. Every user online searching for that store or a product from that store will be immediately exposed to that tweet. This may or may not influence the other users’ decision to visit the store or buy online from it, but the store has no control over what is said. The only control may be giving good service and reasonable prices.

Another application for this new offering is related to what has been happening with microblogging services. Twitter has allowed for people to report events as they happen. Many important journalists have their twitter account and constantly tweet about new articles and things happening around. Now, the tweets will no longer be circumscribed to Twitter.com, anyone (even those who presently are twitterless) will be exposed to what people are saying about the subject and in time, the tendency will be to finally fall to the pressure and get an account in Twitter.

Its an interesting time to be online. The brave will establish themselves, the rest will follow. Where is your company today?

Ma Cualli Ohtli!

More about this from the blogosphere:

Ben Parr

Chris Crum

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

After some days of incredible anguish, Bing webmaster central is up and running again!

Still, Bing makes me cringe every time I visit it. The crawling is still erratic and still in need of some serious fix up. It does not make any sense that Bing’s bots will crawl a site but only take 1 page or 2 instead of the whole content. Or that it will suddenly take 5 pages and leave to never come back or come back and take 1 more page… you get the idea.

Bing... the indecision engine.

Speculation arise! Some say its strategy as Bing wants only the best pages of each site, therefore not indexing all of your site. Others think Bing’s crawler is damaged and needs repairs. And still others believe Bing is Bing and being a 10% market share holder at this time means you shouldn’t waste too much time trying to figure it out.

I tend to jump on all three camps depending on my mood and the day. As it is, I usually recommend people to focus on big players (mainly Google) and let Bing be Bing and hope one day you get better results. I of course, can’t do that. I have to know what makes Bing tic and will keep poking at it until the truth is revealed and can be used to help my clients. If there is a plan, I fail to understand it as well as many other SEOs and webmasters, but maybe that’s because our little minds can’t comprehend the secret master plan behind Bing’s MSNBot.

Rant’s end. I’m a happy blogger again.

Ma Cualli Ohtli!

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

If you have a webmaster center account in Bing, you may have noticed that Bing’s webmaster center has been down for some days. This has prompted some to speculate the reason behind such a problem and left many a good webmaster hanging for dear life as they can’t review the information about their sites. Some claim this might be the end of the world and that without Bing no human can find information online anymore. I think that’s just way overboard.

Bing webmaster center is down...

I’ve had people asking me about this and I can only provide you Bing’s response here. Basically, “We are working on it, soon it will be back”. That was a couple of days ago, still waiting!

This reminds me the Windows Blue Screen of death and the Xbox 360 Red Rings of Death… maybe we should call this the Bing Pink note of death?

Ma Cualli Ohtli!

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

The search engine battle is still pretty much at a standstill. Google, as everyone knows, is still number one. Yahoo is still trailing in second and Bing… well, let’s just say its not aLive.

Since Microsoft’s big launch of Bing, many people gave it a chance, but, as many frustrated users and webmasters can testify, it still has a lot of bugs to fix. For sure it gives good results for very important and known information, but beyond that, it has serious crawling issues as it is not indexing sites properly (or as far as most webmasters can tell by following Bing’s own instructions).

The so called “decision engine” has a lot of decisions to make if it wants to get some notice in the search engine game.

Here the graphs:

Is it me, or there is a slight breeze coming from the gap between Bing and the other search engines?

This was the scene before Live.com became Bing.com... this is when MS execs began banging their heads against the wall.

Things are still all good and well with Google, so much that Matt Cutts (if you don’t know this guy, check out his blog for details) released an article inviting ONLY Yahoo search engineers to work at Google. As you read the article, notice the lack of invitation for Bing engineers.The article is here.

Do let me know what you think here below at the comments or email me. If you have any question, subject suggestion or else, comment or email.
Ma Cualli Ohtli!

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.