Much of the growth is being attributed to the growing shift of marketing dollars from traditional to digital media, much of which as a result of the rapidly evolving ecosystem built on top of the social Internet—blogs, Twitter, Facebook, word-of-mouth and viral campaigns.

The new report, however, is not necessarily all good news; especially for the economy at large. “Still, economic blue skies are not seen everywhere in the ad world,” said David Hallerman, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report “US Ad Spending: How Big Is the Bounceback?” “Ironically, spending growth online is partially attributable to economic instability.

“The anxiety attached to the still-healing economy encourages marketers to bet more on ‘sure things’—and the ability to measure Internet ads, especially search, makes them more sure than most traditional ad spending,” he said.

Like the Super Bowl every year, where the ad business is as talked about as much as the event itself, major sporting occasions tend to draw the largest budgets from major advertisers out the best work from those responsible for putting the ads together.

Now, with the 2010 World Cup now upon us, there are a number of great commercials which have become incredibly popular on YouTube. Let’s look at a couple.

Nike Football: Write the Future

Uploaded: May 17th, 2010
Views to date: 15,576,055

adidas Originals – Star Wars™ Cantina 2010

Uploaded: June 4th, 2010
Views to date: 3,297,285

To be honest, I don’t know too much about how the success or failure of traditional TV commercials are judged, however my feeling is that the extent of how they are shared and distributed across the web is certainly becoming a factor.

With so much going on in different venues all over the City, the toughest task was figuring out which ones to go to. Well, along with dealing with the hangover’s which come with the late night partying!

In short, the week was an awe-inspiring whirlwind of innovation and entrepreneurialism with the social web, mobile and the open web being common themes.

Of all of the events (and parties) that I attended, one which really stood out was a panel discussion at the Journalism Institute at New York University in downtown Manhattan, entitled ‘The Future of Media’ The panel focused on how the Internet and other digital media are transforming the traditional media landscape.

What attracted me to RSVP for this event was two-fold. Firstly, Arianna Huffington, Co-Founder and Editor in Chief of the Huffington Post, of which I am a big fan, was one of the panel members. The other reason was simply because of the title of the event ‘The Future of Media’. I mean, how could I resist?

The panel also consisted of Dan Abrams of Mediaite, Josh Cohen of Google News, David Eun of AOL Media, James Pitaro of Yahoo! Media and Cindi Leive, Editor in Chief of Glamour.

Overall, a really great panel discussion only hampered perhaps by the strict 60 minutes that were available. One of the highlights being Arianna’s dig at Rupert Murdoch’s ‘Paywall’ approach to content.
My only gripe was perhaps that the subject matter deserved a much longer session.

Watch here.

Other highlights included socialite and occasional TV presenter, Julia Allison discussing ‘over-sharing’ and privacy with Jeff Jarvis, creator of BuzzMachine.com and author of ‘What Would Google Do?’ and NBC4 New York discussing TV in the Age of Social Media. Both of these videos, as well as many others can be viewed at http://www.livestream.com/internetweekny

Anyway, to spare you effort of having to leave dconstruction, here is the presentation in its entirety:

1. Keep the number of keywords per ad group to a minimum. If you have more than 20 keywords in one ad group, this should be reviewed. All keywords in an ad group should be very similar. By taking this approach, you will be able to make your ad copy as relevant as possible to the users search.

2. Experiment. Success in paid search can only be optimized by testing and analyzing results. Make sure that you run multiple ads per ad group and remove those that perform poorly. Since a major component of quality score is click through rate (CTR), poorly performing ads will drag it down. This also applies to keywords, so use negatives and consider dropping keywords that do not generate clicks.

3. Use Keyword in headline AND body of ads. Providing that it makes sense, this is something worth employing. Make sure that the ad copy does not look spammy. This approach also provides the additional benefit of more of the ad being shown in bold type and therefore more eye-catching.

4. Landing Page Relevance. Make sure that when a user clicks on your ad that they are taken to the most relevant page on your site, even if it’s not the home page. In an time when humans are bombarded with more information and white noise than ever before, it is important that the page that the searcher is taken to is the answer to their question, or solution to their problem. People do, or should not tolerate having to spend time searching when they do not have to.

5. Landing Page content. To take landing pages a step further, If possible, make sure that the keyword is mentioned in the page heading, the main body of text (in context) and even in the URL after the domain name).

Let us know how you get along!

1. 45.4 million people in the U.S. owed a smartphone in an average month during the December to February period, up 21 percent from the three months ending November 2009. – ComScore

2. 18% of mobile users access social networking sites or blogs via a handheld device. Browsers were used by 29.4 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers (up 2.4 percentage points), while subscribers who used downloaded applications made up 27.5 percent (up 1.8 percentage points). – ComScore

3. 79.4% of multi-channel retailers are not using mobile, meaning that there is a huge opportunity here. – eMarketer

4. Mobile devices are being used for shopping – The ShopSavvy app allows users to comparison shop right in the store, by scanning a product’s bar code using a camera phone records over 40 million scans per month.

5. About 85% of all U.S. households own at least one mobile phone, compared to 73% of PC ownership.

6. Over 100 million users access Facebook from a mobile device. – Facebook.com

7. According to a recent Juniper Research report, ‘The Mobile Marketing & Retail Opportunity’, the value of the mobile retail market is anticipated to exceed $12 billion (£9 billion) by 2014.

8. Independent app store GetJar has released a report that predicts that the global mobile applications market will be worth $17.5 billion (£11.5 billion) by 2012, a fourfold increase from its value of $4.1 billion in 2009.

9. When mobile advertising is purchased alongside traditional online advertising, performance increases- the click-through rate online was 150% higher amongst those that were exposed to – and recalled – the mobile ad. – Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB)

10. When exposed to ads across online and mobile, recognition was 43% greater than those exposed just to the online component. – Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB)

There is no doubt that if you use paid search as a part of your online marketing strategy, Google has been front and center and an obvious choice for the past few years.  On the other hand, Microsoft’s search engine has all-too-often been viewed by marketers as a peripheral option and a non-essential media buy with not enough traffic to justify the time you would have to spend implementing and managing it. Because of this, it was common to simply be left off of the schedule entirely.

Since the new deal could deliver Bing as much as 28%* of the US search market share, or around 4.1 billion monthly searches, from the perspective as a marketer, the question is this; Is Bing now a must-have on the PPC media schedule?

Although the partnership will leave Bing far behind Google in terms of market share, Microsoft has eliminated a competitor and now has a fairly compelling argument to take to advertisers.

Assuming that Google does have to share the paid search media schedule with Bing, this perhaps leads to a more concerning question for the search giant; where is the budget going to come from?

As always, we would love to hear your thoughts

(* Yahoo! Sites – 20.1%, Microsoft Sites – 8.4% ComScore June ’09)

News Flash: Social Media is huge. Today, Facebook has over 300 million subscribers and Twitter is the new Associated Press. In the world of digital marketing, social media marketing (SMM) is the subject de jour and the interest seems to be doubling on a daily basis. Last week a google search on “The benefits of social marketing” returned 124 million results, today, that number is 181 million – a growth of over 8 million pages per day.

There is no question that there is significant hype surrounding this subject and how it can be leveraged in the world of business. With that said, there are also some convincing arguments why social marketing may not be such a great marketing tool for your business.

Here is a list of 4 reasons for and against you and your company adding social media marketing into the mix. Read, consider & decide.

Reasons For Social Media: -

1.  It’s free! – Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks require no funding. In contrast, almost all other forms of advertising and marketing efforts require some kind of fee.

2. Simple & convenient to set-up and maintain – Regardless of your level of web-savvyness, social networks make it very quick and simple to set-up, customize, manage & maintain your profile. This profile lists crucial information about your business. Providing you have access to a computer, you can be a part of social media.

3. Buzz! – Unlike outbound marketing efforts such as traditional advertising, social networks not only allow customers to provide feedback to organizations, they actively encourage it.  Interaction, engagement and sharing are all parts of social media, which if utilized in the correct way can lead to viral exposure, trust, customer loyalty, free market research and brand growth.

4. Volume – As mentioned at the top of this article, Facebook has over 300 million active users globally and still growing face. Other Social networks can also boast extreme levels of popularity, with Twitter unique user levels growing by over 700% in 2008. Only Myspace is showing any signs of a decline in numbers.

Reasons Against Social Media: -

1. Infancy of medium – Social media is still very much the baby of marketing platforms. Despite the theories and the buzz, where are the actual case studies? Most of us have heard recently that Dell Computers have generated $3 million of revenue through twitter. That’s great, but there don’t seem to be too many others. Some big brands such as Adidas, Starbucks, Pringles and Coca-cola are often sited as shining examples of the use of social media, but really, how many pairs of sneakers have Adidas actually shifted as of a result of having a popular fan page on Facebook? How many bums are Twitter really putting on Jet Blue’s seats? How many additional cans of soda are flying off the shelf because Coke has 3.5 million Facebook fans?

Another worrying statistic for social media marketers is a recent report from Consumer information company, Knowledge Networks, saying that while 83% of the Internet population (ages 13 – 54) participates in some way with “social media”, less than 5% turn to social sites for advice pertaining to a purchase decision.

By no means am I suggesting that social media cannot have a positive impact on your business, there is just very little proof that it does.

2. Blog’s don’t write themselves – Social Media Marketing requires resources. Resources that many smaller companies simply do not have. It takes time and time is money. Like SEO, there is no media cost attached to SMM which makes the prospect very appealing, but frequently creating content for your blog, maintaining your Facebook fan page or group, sending out tweets, participating in discussions on LinkedIn and recording videos for You Tube all very labor intensive activities.

3. Social networks hate spam – Social media is a place where brands have conversations. It’s a place where a company can build trust and relationships with existing and potential customers. The problem is that as networks become increasingly popular, spammers and commercially aggressive marketers are becoming rife and unavoidable. The big problem with this is that unless Facebook, Twitter and other popular networks address the issue, users will leave just as soon as they arrived. The other problem is that those that just see social networks as a free advertising platform are tarnishing the reputation of others that are genuinely adding value and engaging with customers.

4. Live by the Sword, Die by the Sword – In late 2004, blogger Jeff Jarvis purchased a new laptop from Dell Computers. After a series of very negative experiences with Dell’s customer service department, Jarvis decided to publish his complaints on the infamous blog, “Dell Hell”.  Jarvis’ posts soon caught the attention of others who also began to add their own negative experiences with Dell’s customer service.   Before long “Dell Hell” caught the attention of the mainstream media. As a result of the bad press and Dell Inc.’s failure to respond on the issue, the computer giant’s sales and stellar reputation started to freefall.

The point is this; Buzz is not always positive and unless you continuously monitor response and engage in damage limitation, before you know it you can be face-to-face with a monster that will be hard to beat!

To conclude, social media is a great tool for businesses to market themselves, but only if done right.  Before you go down the social road, it’s crucial to figure out a coherent strategy and stick to it. It’s important to consider exactly who you’re looking to target, how you’re going to target them, what you’re hoping to achieve and how you will measure success. If you don’t do this, marketing through social networks will become an overwhelming and impossible task where you will fail to make a significant footprint or provide a valuable offering to potential customers.  It’s true, Social Media Marketing is extremely labor intensive, and therefore you need to consider what resources you have available and how much time you can give to your social efforts without adversely effecting productivity.  You may also have to consider if this marketing effort is best kept in-house or outsource to an agency with some expertise in this field.

It’s true that there are very few examples of how social media has positively impacted the bottom-line of businesses, however, I am convinced that given a little time, these case studies will begin to emerge.

The final point to take away is that social network is not meant to compensate for a poor product or an inept customer service. If there is an issue with your product or service, be careful because social media will slap you right in the face.

By keeping focus on your objectives and considering the points laid out in this article, it’s not only possible to survive in social media marketing, it’s likely that you will thrive.