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I’m not a fan of the iPhone, or iPad come to that (more later). But it wasn’t until yesterday evening at the CIPR that I learned quite how manic some marketers have become. The following conversation won’t be verbatim as I wasn’t party to it, but it’s a good representation of the story as I heard it last night from those who are having these conversations too regularly: _________ Marketer: We need an iPhone app? Mobile marketing expert: Righteo. Why’s that? Marketer: Because they’re really cool and cool’s where it’s at for our target demographic. Mobile marketing expert: Cool, yes, and who’s the target? Marketer: Teenagers. Mobile marketing expert: Do you know that iPhone penetration is just 4% in the UK, and that’s only 0.5% amongst UK teenagers? Marketer: Oh :-( _________ The bring all sorts of people together under one roof for a beer and a chat about specific interesting issues. On conducting a quick straw poll of the super collection of people last night, we had roughly an equal split of Blackberrys, iPhones, Android (mostly HTC) and ‘other’, making for an unrepresentatively high proportion of smartphones. ...

The Semantic Web, aka Web 3.0, is here. Now. And there is, as yet, little concerted recognition of or contribution to it by the influence profession… all the converging marketing and PR disciplines. But is about to arrive in our lives, and in a big way. For example, what if I told you that when Best Buy embraced aspects of the Semantic Web its website saw a 30% increase in traffic. ...

The more stuff there is, the more difficult it is to find the right stuff at the right time. Guess that’s almost Google’s raison d’etre, but have they got it right? Is there a better or alternative search approach for you and your colleagues, and what would this mean for your marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO )? Google’s highly secretive approach to working out what might be more relevant to your search query is called PageRank . Fundamentally, their innovation counts a link to a website as a vote for that website’s content. And a link to your site from a higher PageRanked site is worth more than a link from a lowly site. This approach blew the competition away (remember Alta Vista?), and Microsoft and Yahoo! have been playing catchup since. But when was the last time you hyperlinked to a website? ...

Just watched Giles Palmer’s presentation on search trends here at Being Digital . His company, Magpie , is one of those I’m including in my upcoming eBook on Social Web Analytics (pushed back a week or so due to better than expected social life… yes, I have one). [Simon Grice listens in to Giles Palmers presentation]. Currently Microsoft’s Jeff Kelisky (ex-Multimap CEO) is talking about Microsoft search being an online representation of the real world… 3D search if you like. He’s showing a video of 3D cityscapes, but I can’t see much search going on. Hang on, no, that’s just a virtual Earth 3D demo. Mmmm, looks like Jeff doesn’t know if he’s in search or mapping. Or perhaps both, but as he’s pointed out, we’ve had the panel on location today. Jeff has also been keen to big up MIcrosoft’s cashback search I posted about recently . ...

Six searches are conducted via Google for every two on Yahoo and one on Microsoft Live . That’s not how Microsoft would like it. So the news from Microsoft last night (well, by British Summer Time anyway), CASHBACK! Here’s how it’s worked so far. The search engines deliver paid-for results alongside so-called organic (not paid for) search results. When someone clicks on one of these paid-for results / aka “sponsored links” / aka “ads”, the search engine charges the advertiser. If these ads were served on an affiliate site, the affiliate site owner gets a share of that revenue. So everyone is a winner. The search engine makes serious revenue (Google made $1.31 billion on revenues of $5.19 billion in the last quarter, the majority from search related ads), searchers see ads relevant to their search query, and the advertisers attract relevant visitors to their websites. ...

When historians write up 2007, they will surely highlight three things. Of course there’s the subprime mortgage disaster and the reunion of the Spice Girls (a subprime pop group?), but my topic here is the mega marketing clash of the huge tech titans. I’ve been in tech for some years now, but unless it’s a case of the nearer the clearer, I can’t recall such furiously fought marketing battles. The last big battles, by popular concensus, were won by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Google’s search. They appeared to trounce the competition, the first by anticompetitive practices according to the European Union, and the second by peer-beating capability. Do you recall an advert for IE or Google? ...

Just found a press release from Google launching their market-leading Adsense service for the mobile device. “AdSense for Mobile is intended for AdSense partners who have created websites specifically for mobile browsers, and who want to monetize their mobile content via contextual advertising.” The full release is available here .