In previous blogs (A Brighter Look at an Impending Recession), I’ve written about the recession and it’s affects on not only the US economy but also on online marketing. Well, what once was an “impending” recession is now in high gear, making things even stickier for advertisers, marketers, and businesses alike.  So I thought I’d touch base on what the latest word on the street (street, as in, online marketing sources) was. An article by Kevin Lee from ClickZ discusses some basic, yet crucial, ways that online marketing may be affected by the recession: (more…)

In the spirit of the upcoming holiday, I thought it would be interesting to look at what kind of spending costs and profits the Easter Bunny may have after this 2008 season. According to the Nielsen Company, US consumers are buying an estimated $318 million worth of chocolate candy; only second to Valentines day. Online ad spend during last year’s season totaled $800,000 from Lent through Easter.

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As Barry Chu (General Manager of Advertising at Medio Systems) discussed, highly personalized, extreme penetration, precision targeting continues to keep mobile search advertising on the forefront of online marketing and these were the themes touched on during this session. While summarizing the game-changing rules of successful mobile marketing, he positioned mobile advertisers to know what people need before asking.What works for the PC consumer may have flat-line results for the mobile user.  (more…)

This afternoon’s SES NYC panel titled, “Selling your integrated plan to the C-Suite” was equally populated by Agency-types and Marketers. Both constituencies came searching for the same thing -insight into putting together an internal pitch to gain the executive support and resources necessary to test and develop your marketing campaign. (more…)

We have had several attendees at this week’s Search Engine Strategies New York conference. In an effort to share our learnings from the conference, we will be posting entries that will provide summaries of some of the key sessions. Keep an eye out for these entries!

Last November, Google opened up Google Maps to community editing, allowing registered users to move around the pushpins where businesses were located in attempts to improve the accuracy of local business information. Yesterday, Google took this a step further and is now letting registered users update/change location information (address, city, phone number…etc.), as well as ADD new business information. Do you have to be the business owner to do this? Google says no. ANYONE can edit this information. But you have to be registered, and since everything is recorded, malicious competitors (who want to switch phone numbers or listings) will be caught if anything is altered under a false pretense. Google also announced that once a business is “claimed” by a business owner, it cannot be edited.

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Google now offers a program for Google Analytics users to share their websites performance data.  The data is contributed anonymously on an opt-in basis.  It is then aggregated with data from contributors in the same industry creating an industry average.  This provides insight into how a user’s website performs against others in their industry or vertical.

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