MarketingSherpa members got a preview of our 2009 Social Media Marketing and PR Benchmark Guide last week. An executive summary, table of contents, and some great charts and analysis were released to them in PDF form.

The complete guide will be released the week of Feb. 9. Here are a few interesting nuggets for all of you to contemplate right now. Continue »

When a budget gets cut, experimental marketing dollars are often the first to go. Management cannot afford to dabble in unproven strategies. They want to focus on predictable, reliable tactics.

What a bore, right? You’ve been reading about social networks and viral marketing all year–and now you can’t get the budget to test them. Fear not, help is here.

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The New York Times ran an article this week describing the challenges of advertising on social media sites, Facebook in particular. The article describes Procter & Gamble’s experience with brand advertising on the world’s largest social network and leads the reader to believe that it’s been less than fruitful.

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Even though more B2B marketers consider a role for social media in their marketing strategy, I still hear them express confusion about measuring the impact of creating blogs or participating in social networks. Typical questions:

How do you measure engagement? What’s the value of one Twitter follower? What’s the direct ROI of that blog post you wrote?

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I’ve run across a quick tactic for those of you battling to get users to engage with your Web 2.0 marketing strategies.

I recently wrote stories about companies that offer social networking services through smart phones. Two of the companies–Kiwibox and Buzzd–have rewards programs to encourage engagement. Continue »

I’m going over my notes from an interview with Mike Howard, Chief Operating Officer, Kiwibox, today and I’m impressed with his team’s mobile marketing strategy and content management skills. Kiwibox is a teen-based network for user generated content and socializing.

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The evolution of blogs continues to fascinate me – with marketing and PR pros leading the way in finding innovative uses for them.

Take Todd Defren from SHIFT Communications. He’s recognized as the creator of the Social Media Release. Todd has this idea that companies should create online newsrooms on a blog platform.

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MarketingSherpa’s recent Selling Online Subscriptions Summit 2008 in New York City gave scores of takeaways to participants. Here are a few of most consistent messages I picked up from the conference:

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You’re a publisher still looking for a podcasting strategy. Or you’re worried about making a big investment of time and resources.  You could be sitting on a heap of readily available audio content: Interview recordings your editorial team has made for its print articles.

Reporters typically gather way more information than they can fit into their stories. If those interviews are on tape, you can cull some of the best anecdotes and other information that never made it into print and edit them into podcasts that are relevant to your audience.

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