The Pew Research Center through its Internet and American Life Project has released a study called “Where People Get Information About Restaurants and Other Local Businesses“. It can be a bit of an eye opener when it comes to the perceived pervasive sharing about social activities by using social media.

The chart below shows where people go to get information about local businesses other than restaurants, bars and clubs.

The news for social media is only slightly better when you include bars, restaurants and clubs in the mix with only 3% of the respondents saying social media does this job for them. Any time you see the words in a column saying “to small a group to give reliable statistics” you have to wonder about the impact of that area.

With the end of 2011 nearly upon us, it’s time to take a look at 2012 and from here, it’s looking pretty nice.

StrongMail has published the results of their marketing trends survey and we’ve got it all right here. The most encouraging sign is the fact that 92% of businesses surveyed said they plan to increase or maintain their marketing spend.

For those planning to increase, email was awarded the biggest bonus with 60% of respondents saying they’ll increase spend in that area. Social media was a close second with 55%.

But take a look at mobile. Only 37% said they’d be spending more marketing dollars in that area and that’s both surprising and not. Surprising, because mobile is one of the fastest moving trends in both marketing and for consumers. With so many people turning to mobile to shop, it’s an avenue that has to be explored if a company wants to stay current.

Sure HubSpot is the sponsor of our Inbound Marketing channel but this would have been news anyway.

The Cambridge, MA company that now has over 5,000 businesses using their SaaS (software as a service) inbound marketing software system has developed and introduced a new free tool called Marketing Grader to do more than just analyze your website’s performance. The idea is that while your website is important there is so much more to the Internet and social media marketing cycle. The new Marketing Grader service takes a look at a company’s online marketing on a broader scale.

From the press release

Earnest Hemingway once wrote a complete, compelling story in just six words:
“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

A great museum’s curation is defined not only what’s inside, but what’s also left out.

A solution should be as simple as possible, and no simpler.

20% of the work gets 80% of the results.

The Problem With Marketers Marketing Themselves

I’ve been taking a close look at our industry these past few months. As I looked at Ontolo’s marketing tools, the marketing tools of our competitors, and the marketing content that’s pumped out on a daily basis, I began to notice something peculiar…

As you know, value is interpreted, in part, by the difficulty of the task. The more difficult the task, often, the more valuable it is to get the task done.

We hear this all the time. People want to be heard. That’s why social media is taking off like it is. Even the Godfather of social, Mark Zuckerberg, talks this way and he is betting Facebook’s future on this desire for people to share and even overshare, if that’s what it takes to be heard.

If being heard is so important then why does a recent study show that many companies that are involved in social media aren’t placing listening, and the incumbent response, as one of the highest priorities? eMarketer reported on a study conducted by MarketTools and found the following with regard to companies hearing and responding to customer complaints. First a look at whether or not companies even THINK that their customers complain online.

If you haven’t heard about Google’s “Freshness Update” by now, I’m sure you’ll be hearing about it much more. The short story is that Google is now “Giving you fresher, more recent search results.“. Marketing Pilgrim took a look at this update as well. So what’s next?

Well, “new” content is now ranking higher for many searches.

Looking around at various search results across the board, some of the results are astounding. As Rand Fishkin pointed out, a Google query for “Top Chef Texas” is almost entirely composed of content that is just days old. Changing the number of results to 100 doesn’t help much, either.

So how do you leverage this? What can you do to try and ensure that you have a shot at “fresh” rankings?

Marketing is undergoing a major change. Inbound marketing and the shift to online is forcing marketers make changes to their marketing infrastructure.  This means a reduction in agency design fees and trade publication advertisements in favor of marketing software to boost lead generation and lead management.

Marketing Automation tools should be part or a larger inbound marketing tools set. When looking specifically at marketing automation features, marketers should keep these five key features top of mind.

5 Essential Features Of A Marketing Automation Platform

1. Click Tracking – It may seem simple but one of the core functions of a great marketing automation system is click tracking. As a marketer you need to understand the click-through rate for the links in your marketing automation campaigns. More importantly you need the conversion events attributed to marketing automation campaigns if they triggered the conversion as oppose to another source like direct traffic.