Marketing Pilgrim

According to a new study by Econsultancy and ExactTarget, marketers face a conundrum when it comes to increasing their online marketing budgets in 2010.

They want to do it, but 40% of those surveyed simply don’t have the budget to spend more on marketing this year.

What to do; what to do?

I know, let us reduce our spending on print ads (41%), radio (36%), and TV (31%):

And channel those funds into Facebook and Twitter (70%), blogging (64%), and SEO (64%):

Do you use the same username and password across multiple web sites?

Then you’re not welcomed at Twitter!

That may sound like an exaggeration, but read this statement from Twitter, then you tell me if I’m exaggerating:

The takeaway from this is that people are continuing to use the same email address and password (or a variant) on multiple sites.  Through our discussions with affected users, we’ve discovered a high correlation between folks who have used third party forums and download sites and folks who were on our list of possibly affected accounts.  While not all users who were sent a password reset request fall into this category, we felt that it was important to put this knowledge out there so that users would know of the possibility of compromise of their data by a third party unrelated to their Twitter account.  We strongly suggest that you use different passwords for each service you sign up for…

Is Apple’s Steve Jobs the king of subliminal marketing?

You decide:

Wow!

(via)

Basically since Twitter became popular, there have been companies offering “pay for followers” services. Back in August, for example, we talked about one company offering 1000 followers for $87. But it turns out those followers are way overpriced—the going rate on eBay is less than 1¢ per follower, as TechCrunch reports.

Some of the Buy-It-Now listings include 5,000 followers for $20 (which comes to 0.4 penny/follower), $5,500 for $40 (0.7 penny/follower), $1,100 for $10 (0.9 penny/follower). You are not actually buying followers outright (Twitter doesn’t allow people to transfer their followers), but rather services which “guarantee” getting your account up to the promised number of followers through “proven and safe methods.” Some even only count reciprocal followers (followers who follow back).

So the other day, I was talking to a client about a new project they want to begin in the next couple of months. From their mindset this project is going to be huge and may redefine their organization in the coming years. As part of this new project they want a sophisticated web presence. They read off a list of different social networks and services that they want their new site to engage. My first thought was Wow I am going to bill them out the ying yang for all this! But, then my conscience kicked in (yes, I have one), and I had to ask, “do you think all of this is necessary?” They were kind of surprised with my question and responded, “well yes, why wouldn’t it be?”. I then asked them, “well. what are your goals with each service?” They didn’t really say much after that.

If you are aware of SAS, a company located in Cary, NC then you understand or have a need to understand business analytics. As the largest privately-held software company in the world, SAS often flies under the radar because what they do isn’t sexy. Instead, it is necessary.

Necessary business functions don’t get the same attention or play that the exciting new and ‘edgy’ companies get. SAS is OK with that though. If you’ve ever visited their campus and saw how they treated their employees, you may quickly value necessary over sexy. A result of this reverence for their employees, the company merited the top spot on Fortune’s Top 100 Best Companies to Work For list this year. Actually you can find the company somewhere on that list just about every year but this year it’s number 1.

What do you know? Dynamic Logic’s 2009 Ad Reaction (PDF) survey shows that consumers may not hate social media ads after all. A series of surveys took a look at the popularity of social networking as well as ad reception across various media.

The December 2009 survey of 2000 US adults found that 59% were involved in social networking and another 16% were interested, but hadn’t tried it yet. (Email was tops with 95% actively participating and 2% interested.) The same survey asked for users’ attitudes toward advertising on various media. The top two positive responses (which I assume were along the lines of “excellent” and “good”) were reported—and social media ads were on-par with search ads:

If you know Tamar Weinberg, you know, she knows, social media.

If you don’t know Tamar Weinberg, then when I tell you she’s the community and marketing manager for Mashable–the #1 social media blog in the world–you’ll believe that she knows social media.

So, you’ll probably want to jump on this opportunity to win one of 3 copies of her fantastic new book The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web.

As the book promises, it will help you:

• Explore blogging and microblogging, and find out how to use applications such as Twitter to create brand awareness