Today I received an alarming e-mail from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) with a link to their press-release that read the following:

“NEW YORK, NY (November 20, 2008) — The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and  PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) today announced that Internet advertising revenues reached almost $5.9 billion for the third quarter of 2008″

That’s only a 11% increase from Q3 ‘07 and only a 2% increase from the Q2 ‘08. I remember when the Q1 ‘08 report came out, I wrote an article titled “IAB Q1 ‘08 Report in Perspective“. 1/2 a year later and if you look at the graph above, you’ll see very little growth…more like a “bunny hill” than anything else.

“The growth of interactive advertising that we’ve been experiencing over the past few years has stabilized due in large part to the difficult current economic climate,” said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of the IAB.”(IAB)

Now that the Retail industry is predicting huge cuts in online spending, the Automotive industry in shambles,”the fourth quarter could see an actual decline in both U.S. and global growth.” (TechCrunch) Bear in mind this is highly speculative and there are more factors out there than our current economic situation. Online marketers are coming up with highly innovative and revenue generating cost-effective methods that may help fix this “situation”. Keep your fingers crossed, hold on tight, and hope Q4’s report is nothing more than a bunny-hill.

So what did I learn about Blogging today? When something new, innovative and long awaited comes out and you’re only one of a few with access…BLOG ABOUT IT! There ya go. Learn from this event. Now for your viewing pleasure, check out my theme’s screen-shot below. I decided to go with the “Shiny” Theme:

If you’re like me and work forces you to stick with the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES), then it’s not easy to jump to iPhone knowing you’ll lose work e-mail connectivity. The exchange server forwards just don’t cut it! So it really comes down to the New Bold or the Storm, AT&T vs. Verizon…mono vs mono…which is why this review is extremely important. Click the picture below to check it out for yourself:

YouTube is launching its first ever live streaming event that will celebrate it’s endless list of user communities. Part concert, part variety show and part party, YouTube Live will bring together some of the amazing videos and unforgettable individuals that have contributed towards making the site what it is today. Expect to see Internet-born stars like Soulja Boy Tell’em, Esmee Denters, and “Canon Rock” virtuoso Funtwo, a global b-boy showcase featuring dancers from the movie Planet B-boy, Discovery Channel’s MythBusters and lots more.

But one thing is still unclear. Why did they call it a “Live Streaming Event“? Isn’t this more than event? Isn’t this the luanch of Google Live!? That’s the thing…nobody knows for sure. Here’s my time line covering YouTube Live from the first time it was mentioned until now:

• January 2008: First rumored on the popular blog Scobleizer.com,  when Robert Scoble asked the Chad Hurley (co-founder of Youtube), “Is YouTube working on streaming video?”. Chad responded, “We’re working on a lot of interesting things…” (watch the video here).

• February 2008:  NewTeeVee published a video taken by video-blogger Sarah Meyers asking Steve Chen (CTO & co-founder of youtube) “When are you guys gonna do live video on YouTube?” in which Chen responded:
  • “2008. We’ll do it this year. Live video is just something that we’ve always wanted to do, we’ve never had the resources to do it correctly, but now with Google, we hope to actually do it this year.” (watch the video)
    

• August 2008: according to an anonymous source cited by Silicon Alley Insider’s Michael Learmonth, they state that YouTube is not getting into live streaming. Well, that didn’t last long!

• October 3rd 2008: Wired.com’s Blog anounced that “YouTube will be hosting an event called YouTube Live in San Francisco on November 22 which (as the name implies) will be streamed live on its site”. (Blog.Wired.com) That same day, Gawker Media blog Valleywag also anounced YouTube is going live after all. But they also supported Michael Learmonth’s position saying “Google and YouTube won’t necessarily be offering live streaming video to users of the site any time soon.”

• October 22nd, 2008: AlleyInsider goes ahead and publishes a followup to their August article with a new one titled YouTube Launching Live Streaming Service — Or Something.  They claimed a source was telling them that “someone personally involved in the YouTube Live! event on November 22 [...] specifically described it as Youtube’s Live launch.”

• November 19th, 2008: Well here we are! In 3 days the Youtube Live! event is taking place. Will this be the “official launch” or just a one-time-thing?

So I went to 6 different Salary Predicting sites, typed in the term “Online Marketing Manager” and here is what I came up with:

1. Indeed.com: $72,000
2. SimplyHired: $76,000
3. Salary.com: $73,000
4. Yahoo! Hot Jobs:$64,145
5. CareerBuilder Salary: $86,746
6. Monster.com: $81,555

I was also able to get my hands on an effective PayScale salary widget. PayScale is a market leader in global online compensation data, and this widget directly accesses the world’s largest database of individual employee compensation profiles. Give it a shot:

LinkedIn recently added several applications to its services to help users connect with their network.  One of those is WordPress,  allowing you to “connect your virtual lives with the WordPress LinkedIn Application. With the WordPress App, you can sync your WordPress blog posts with your LinkedIn profile, keeping everyone you know in the know”. (LinkedIn) Check out my LinkedIn Profile to see the WordPress App in action.

Also, another factor that could contribute to the drop in Open Rates and Click Through Rates (CTR) is the Subject Header. For anyone new to e-mail marketing, eMarketer conducted earlier studies that showed, shorter subject lines performed better than longer ones:

• Subject Lines < 35 Characters - Open Rates: 19.6% ; CTR: 3.1%
• Subject Lines > 35 Characters - Open Rates: 14.8%; CTR: 1.9%

But don’t start thinking “e-mail is a waste of time”…that’s simply crazy talk! E-mail is 2nd to paid search when it came to driving high volume. (You should already know that!) What I didn’t know was that an average of 4 out of 10 SEM companies said “e-mail marketing yielded the best ROI of any tactic worldwide” (Survey results from January 2008 from Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO)).

If you are looking to do e-mail marketing, I’ll be writing an article next week about “The Best Email Service Provider’s For Small Businesses”, with Q&A, Price Quotes and more.

Want to see Viral Marketing Perfection in action? Here’s a perfect example: Ben Folds is making an album of a cappella versions of their music to be performed by the best university groups they could find! The CD will consist of 12-15 songs chosen from the submissions made. I am currently a member of Queens College acapella group, Tizmoret, so I found myself very intrigued.

Their master-plan was actually motivated by a number of amazing university a cappella versions of their songs published on YouTube. All you have to do is post your video to YouTube and submit the link to the BenFolds.com/Acapella website. Then they’ll go ahead and provide links to the Youtube clips on Benfolds.com, MySpace and Facebook so everyone can see what they’re choosing from. It’s viral marketing to the max…encouraging the public to post their video on the top video publishing site and then linking it with the top 2 social networks in our space…and then linking all of that, back to BenFolds.com!

Oh…and to to top if off, proceeds from sales of the CD will go to a music education charity to be decided. Now that’s what I call good marketing and great PR!

…so if you’re looking into setting up a Viral Marketing campaign, use this as a guideline:

• Provide an incentive
• Make use of “Video”
• Spread your campaign across the 3 largest social networks and then link everything together.

At this point, my fingers are crossed and I hope we win! Check out Tizmoret’s Acapella version of Annie Waits:

(*if pictures don’t appear above, click REFRESH on your browser)

I recently attended my 3rd Ultra Light Startups! I covered last months event in my article Ultra Light Startups - Outsourcing Your Startup!! This months Topic was SEO and SEM:

• Principals of Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing
• Practical advice for maximizing your S.E.O./S.E.M. investment
• Build vs buy (do-it-yourself vs hire an agency) decision criteria
• Customer testimonials and entrepreneur experiences with S.E.O./S.E.M.

For those of you unaware of this event, the mission is simple: “Tech entrepreneurs, sharing techniques to launch faster and cheaper!” A room full of 50+ Entrepreneurs with bootstrapped budgets discussing professional techniques on improving their businesses. A great source for networking and information. And more importantly, the panel at this event felt a lot more engaging than the big conferences, but the content and material was just as good, if not better!

I was very impressed with the companies presenting this time around. I made a few notes  about the companies I found to be the most intriguing. Web100.com presents top 10 and 100 lists in many different categories and brings in over 125,000 page views per month. The funder and CEO of SlipFire, built a web marketing and design company using wordpress (impressive!). I presented RezRedo.com, the 1st and only database of Resume Job Experiences and overall, it received good reactions. Other noteworthy companies included SEO Tools company SEO Drop, TurboCourt the TurboTax for law, and Boomerator.com the one stop shop and social network for Baby Boomers (I’d like to not that they were recently mentioned TechCrunch and Mashable.com). There were many other great presentation and if you want to see the full list of presenting companies, scroll to the bottom of this post.

Once the networking+pizza 1/2 hour was over, the panel was ready to get going. It consisted of the following:

• Maisha Walker, President, Message Medium & Columnist with Inc. Magazine
• Regau Flowers, SEM Director at Comet Conversion
• Cesar Hervieux, Online media buyer and planner with Media Contacts
• Sara Holoubek, Consultant, Editor at SearchBuzz, & Director of SEMPO
• Joseph McElroy, Search Artist at Gigapixel Creative and Chair of IPTV Committee on Emerging Technolgy (SEMPO)

I usually report on the panel in the following manner: Q & A format, where write the question and provide each panelist’s response below it. It lasted about 1 hour, but here’s the most relevant content I was able to write down:

Q: How do you know you’re SEO campaign was effective/is doing well?

• Sarah: “You’re making money (everybody luaghs)…but note that setting a benchmark is very important”
• Regau: “I need to know your GOAL in the beginning”

Q: Pro’s and Con’s of doing SEM in a Content Management System (CMS)?

• Joseph: “Wordpress, Joomla and Drupalare great porgrams. If you’re not going to use a CMS and start from scratch, you better be an expert”

Q: How long until you see results?

• Regau: “It depends on your campaign and goals.”
• Sarah:”As soon as tomorrow to a couple of months. It really depends on Spider Frequency from Google…oh ya, there are other search engines too (everybody laughs). SEO is like PR, where you have to pitch to the editor every day…and the pitch keeps changing.”

Q: SEO Basics?

• Regau: “A huge part is how many sites are ranking in your area! How many site are ranking against you?”
• Sarah: “3 Basics - 1. Make sure a spider can get into your site; 2. Make sure the content is relevant to the text; 3. Internal and External linking.”
• Joseph: “It’s also important for when people get there, what’s going to happen after that?”

Q: What’s the difference in promoting a Product vs. Services?

• Joseph: “You should contentrate more on PPC for Products and SEO for Services.”

Q: How much time should one spend on SEO vs. Social Marketing Optimization (SMO)?

• Regau: “If you’re aiming for the longtail, longer lasting success then SEO…SMO is an ongoing process that needs daily updates.”
• Sarah: “Utilizing social networking sites will be good for Tomorrow’s success…but you have to keep up with it then.”

Overall it was a successfull event and if you’re interested in going, I suggest going to December 4th: Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS) to hear from Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress experts. It’s a guarantee you’ll find what you’re looking for!

Full List of Companies That Presented:

That’s right! To promote Guitar Hero’s World Tour release, they released a number of video’s sporting celebrities imitating the famous scene in Risky Business (1983) where Tom Cruise dances to Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll” in just his underwear! Maybe we can learn something from this type of branding+viral marketing+super-model!

My friends at Viral Video Chart have put this at #7 for Viral Videos, but it’s a Friday and I don’t think Obama video’s will entertain you like this. The video was discovered November 4th, and in just 3 days jumped to 1,199,076 views and 111 (well, now 112) blog-posts!

Enjoy….