One of my favorite thinkers concerning things web-related is Avinash Kaushik. His most recent blog post contains the text of a speech he gave to a gathering of Canadian marketing executives. The point of it is that we fail to take advantage of the promise of Internet marketing because most of us find “shout” marketing and interruption advertising to be more comfortable. It is brilliant. It is controversial. It challenges us all. I just really like it. Take the time to read it here. Send your comments.

The concept of marketing to people based on where they are at any given time took a big leap forward as Facebook and Twitter recently announced the introduction of geolocation features to accompany user posting activity on their services. Combining their efforts with those of the already established players in the space such as Yelp, Foursquare, Latitude, and Gowalla, it seems that 2010 will be a year of great experimentation for this feature. Time will tell whether marketers and application developers can make this feature useful enough to consumers that they will want to enable it. However, it seems likely that we will soon see software platforms that allows us to monitor social media for people who are nearing our location and message to them thereby combining real-time search with real-time marketing.

I hate the click. We obsess about clicks. We track clicks. We pay for clicks. We want more and more clicks. We are click-absorbed and it is time to make online marketing about more than this. This week marked the 15th anniversary of the first online banner ad so I have chosen this time to launch a revolt against the single-minded click-only metrics that prevail today.

OK I know that acronym thinking is trite and that many of us have already heard about the POST methodology until we want to PLOTZ. But, I have been speaking with many companies lately about their social media plans and I have to admit that this old methodology keeps coming up as the one of the best places to start. Here’s a quick review of how it works and why it works so well for social media plans in my opinion.

The term “inbound marketing” tends to bring together the tactics of search and social media under one umbrella.  To me the theme that binds them all together is that they reach people during the natural course of whatever they may be doing online rather than interrupting that process with “Hey pay attention to me now” [...]

Sometimes I have to post things just because I want to remember them. This is a great article by Hollis Thomases listing the variety of services that allow for self-service online ad buying. Ok we all know that the search engines allow us to do this but there are scores of other services as well. We have not tested all of these and there are certainly many pitfalls out there but for research’s sake this list is a good place to start.

Though a certain social network whose name starts with “f” and rhymes with “racebrook” is the one on everyone’s mind these days, do not overlook the possibility that there may be a niche social network out there that could be just the thing for you. Wikipedia has a great jumping off point for those looking to get an overview of the variety of social networks lurking about on the surface of Planet Social Media. Click here to check it out.

I recently heard the director of Socia Media for National Geographic state that his company made a vow when it entered the social media arena “not to let the perfect become the enemy of the good”. Many organizations stand paralyzed on the sidelines trying to come up with the perfect social media strategy that will answer all questions about the investment, the user adoption potential, and the ROI.