Recommended Reading, 1/28/09

Social Media Wins In Marketers’ ’09 Plans

A survey of 196 subscribers to a content marketing newsletter (all right, it’s clearly a biased sample) finds that social media and content marketing will be the big winners in the advertising recession this year. “More than half–56%–of marketing and publishing decision-makers plan to increase their content marketing spending next year.” Only 13% plan to decrease it.

The popular perception of Generation Y or “Millennials” is that they expect the world to beat a path to their door. Not true, says this piece in the Economist. Gen Y members actually have many of the same aspirations and motivations their parents did. The deteriorating economy is forcing them to work harder, but they’re up to the task. And they have multi-tasking and online skills that could benefit businesses in many ways.

If you follow the search world closely, you’ll probably know most of these tips, but there are some hidden gems in there, particularly about the importance of quality content and useful inbound links.

For a given set of pages, PageRank may fluctuate, and rankings do shift as the internet evolves. But in the end, what’s most important is consistently happy users: people who bookmark and share your site, who understand and respect your brand and who can confidently and seamlessly make that purchase.

From Ted Leonsis: Snagfilms is really scaling– we hit 20k affiliate sites that have snagged a virtual movie theatre widget and have reached 100 plus million uniques–since our launch in late July. Check it out and snag a widget today.

This is a great podcast. Paul Dunay speaks with Dan Schawbel the author of the Personal Branding blog as well as the forthcoming book Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success. He’s got lots of good advice for building your personal brand online, syndicating yourself and finding new channels to build awareness.

Paul Dunay’s list of C-level executives who use Twitter, including Richard Branson, George Colony, Tim O’Reilly and others. Still too many geeks and not enough mainstream brands here, but it’s coming along.

Todd Van Hoosear sums it up nicely. “Your job isn’t to get people to care about your product. Your job is to make it easy for a potential client to understand how your organization can help solve a problem.” Your Web presence shouldn’t be all about you; it should be all about your visitors.

Paul Dunay has links to some good reading on the question of whether brands should use Twitter, as well as a list of about 70 brands that do. Readers contribute several more.

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