media+marketing business trend links

• Burned by Branding - What churches can learn from the anti-Starbucks movement. - Christianity Today
• A $500 Milestone for Google Believers - Google now has a market value of $156 billion, exceeding all but 13 American companies — icons of commerce like Exxon Mobil, Johnson & Johnson and Wal-Mart. It is worth more than any media company and all the technology companies except Microsoft, whose software empire it increasingly threatens, and Cisco Systems. - Saul Hansell @ The New York Times
• JupiterResearch Forecasts That 82 Percent of Small Businesses Will Be Online by 2011 - According to a new JupiterResearch report, “Market Profile: Understanding Online Small Businesses,” 82 percent of small businesses will have Internet access by 2011, of which 88 percent will utilize broadband connections. - Jupiter Research
• Top 50 Next-Gen Games - Market researcher BrandIntel has released a list of the Top 50 next-generation games based on consumer hype. - The Age
• Sorrell: Junk Food Ads Will Go Online - Sir Martin Sorrell has warned that Ofcom's junk food ad ban for children's TV could result in marketing budgets switching to the internet. - Guardian Unlimited
• Applying New Marketing Fundamentals in the Internet Era - The starting line of your strategy should be marketing fundamentals. The backbone of traditional marketing has long been the four Ps: product, pricing, placement, and promotion. While these fundamentals still hold true, the Internet has changed marketing and the fundamentals we apply to it. - Guy Maser @ Multichannel Merchant

Comments

[Carl Strohmeyer]

Hard to believe Google now has a market value of $156 billion, exceeding all but 13 American companies.
When Google came on the search engine market it was dominated by a lazy Yahoo that was achieving less relevant searches all the time due to black hat and other SEO tricks that Yahoo was complacent about.
Now Google has not gone as far down as Yahoo did (Yahoo is improving in my opinion, but MSN serves me the most relevant and most important the most current searches for aquatics research). Google offers a lot of user friendly products such as blogspot that I use (I have tried several, and Googles is still the best when it comes to proper function and ease of use, I tried Blog city, and they stunk).
But Google has a lot of problems with integrity and terrible human customer support. I have an Adwords program, Google will force me to bid higher on keywords even when I am happy with lower placement. But Adsense is a case study in business dishonesty. I had an Adsense account in which Google kept placing competitors ads on my site even thought Google was contacted (once again, poor customer service). But it got worse, after a day of unusual activity they disabled my account, took all MY money and would not explain anything. We NEVER did any improper clicks here other than to check on Google’s integrity of links (which was not good), Google has the technology to check this out via the isp and servers, if they did their homework they would have found out that somewhere, someone was performing malicious clicks on my account and THAT isp should have been disabled. Repeated attempts to Google to correct this have gone nowhere. Google also needs better moderation of their forums, the MSN forums I frequent do not have the language and flaming that goes on in Google forums I frequent (which I do as little as possible, but in my business I need to keep a presence in as many places as possible).
Many others I know look at it this way, Google is a cult, they go to Google because it is the thing to do (especially among the liberal elite).