Marketing Pilgrim

We have chronicled the slow death of the newspaper industry for a while now. First, there was the thought that maybe the Internet could displace newspapers with the delivery of content in a more timely and personalized manner. Newspapers decided that they were doing just fine and that they were moving into the digital world in a way that could help them maintain their content delivery fiefdom with no problems. Now, we see a landscape of wreckage where some of the most venerable names in newspaper including the Boston Globe are losing value both monetarily and in reputation. It’s been painful to watch but now there is even more carnage predicted as a result of the Internet age.

Forrester Research says that marketers say they see ROI on email marketing that’s two to three times higher than any other form of direct marketing. 66% of marketers agree that email is the most cost-effective marketing tool at their company.

So why shouldn’t you waste money on email marketing?

Because wasting money is bad—and why waste money when you can make sure your email marketing is even more cost effective?

The Forrester study takes a look at the email marketing forecast for the next five years, and there’s good news: email will continue to grow in popularity among users and marketers alike. Total spending on email marketing will soar to $2B in 2014 (up from $1.2B this year):

Of course, this popularity means that there’s a lot more competition for email users’ time—and a lot more messages bombarding them, and likely to be perceived as spam. With more than 9000 messages per inbox annually by 2014, users will become even more discriminating about what they read.

Last week, Yahoo blogged about yet another microformat they’ll be indexing: Common Tag. Based on RDFa, Common Tag is . . . well . . . kind of like every other semantic microformat out there.

Common Tag is integrated with Zemanta, Adaptive Blue, Yahoo Search Monkey and several other services. In addition to organizing web pages by their meanings, Common Tag can also bring more related content to publishers, and possibly also greater visibility (the Yahoo connection). Yeah, it looks cool, but it’s going to take some serious time and effort before they’ll see enough widespread adoption to make a difference.

At Search Engine Land, Vanessa Fox points out that this wave of the future is still pretty far off for search engines:

Almost 3 years ago, Ben Wills and I enjoyed a joke about a fictitious "7 Minute SEO" plan. Well, it turns out that’s exactly how long it will take you to read my new SEO guide–hence the name "7-Minute SEO Guide."

The guide is something that I’ve put together specifically for the following audience:

• Those that have no idea about SEO
• Those that have no idea about SEO, but pester you with questions
• Those that have no idea about SEO, pester you with questions, but won’t read that SEO book you recommended
• Those that have no idea about SEO, pester you with questions, won’t read that book, and happen to be your client

OK, this is definitely nothing more than a rumor, but Google could be close to launching a real-time microblogging search engine.

Google Operating System spotted an unusual translation request at Google’s Transconsole site. What the heck is Transconsole?

You can volunteer to translate Google’s help information and search interface into your favorite language. By helping with our translation process you ensure that Google will be available in your language of choice more quickly and with a better interface than it would have otherwise.

So a recent translation request looked like this:

Now, it’s only a translation request by Google, but why would you need to translate "recent updates about QUERY" if you weren’t getting ready to launch a real time search engine?

Last week, we gave you a heads-up that Hunch would be launching today. Well, our…ahem…hunch was correct; Hunch.com is now live.

When you visit the site–it’s not really a search engine, as you’ll see–you’ll be asked to answer one simple question. Then another. Then another. In fact, Hunch cleverly draws you in my asking you a series of very simple questions–many of which you feel strangely compelled to answer. Here’s an example:

And another:

After you’ve answered 20 or so questions, Hunch will prompt you to save your answers by creating a new account, after which, it will be able to help you make those not so important decisions in life. Like this one: