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Most everyone has a cell phone and about 50% of them are smart-phones. This presents a great marketing opportunity for business but it seems others perceive a violation of privacy and other concerns.

I'm often invited into companies to consult with them about online marketing and their new website. It happens often - a firm gets a new website developed by another company and we are invited to discuss online marketing strategy. The chief marketing person might say something like, "We just developed a new website and now we need to do something with it. What do you suggest?" Having experienced this very scenario several times, we've developed 3 very powerful questions to begin to shape a comprehensive, long term online marketing plan. Ready - here they are:

Social media has “a new sheriff in town” called Google +. Google has gotten into the social media space in a huge way recently and in only 3 weeks has amassed about 20 million users. What is it? How is it different from Facebook, LinkedIn and some of the other social networks? Is there a business application for this? How will it affect online marketing activities? There are many questions about Google + and this post is only an intro to this exciting new online network.

Search engine marketing spend is about to become the "little brother" to display marketing in the next few years according to some industry experts. By 2015, these experts expect marketing spend on Display to be just shy of $22 billion while they predict search marketing spend that year will come in about $21.5 billion. Display marketing in this context includes online video, banner ads, rich media and the like. While I was surprised by this at first glance, when I think about the emergence of video, I become less surprised. After all, YouTube has become the third most popular website (after Google and Facebook) and is considered by many to be the second most popular search engine after Google.

Social media marketing has so many new and emerging opportunities. One of the most popular these days are the daily deal sites - Groupon and Living Social being the most prominent. However, there are more deal sites popping up all the time targeting more niche spaces. These properties have brought many great deals to consumers, including me, but are they working for the merchants? This post provides some suggestions about how to make one element of social media marketing, the daily deal sites, work financially for the business.

I've read a good deal on the topic of "emotionomics" and it has continued to make an impression on me. Emotionomics in general is the confluence of the products and services with the customer's emotional experience using those products and services. For someone who operates an internet marketing agency, I think of emotionomics as the experience our customers have during a project...a web development project, an seo project, etc. In other words, if we produce great seo results but the process the customer experienced during the project is painful, then the customer thinks poorly of us even though we might achieve awesome results.

Money may not buy happiness, but beauty buys both money and happiness, says a study published online recently that gauged happiness and attractiveness among more than 25,000 people worldwide. This recent study was conducted about how beauty affects happiness and prosperity. This really caught my eye and after reading it, I was fascinated. The researchers concluded that “better-looking people generally earn more money and marry those who are better-looking and higher-earning.” They went on to report that “the top 15% of people ranked by looks are more than 10% happier than those ranked in the bottom 10%.” Remember, these are results from a study, not my personal opinion. Thank God because I'm clearly not the most attractive person around!

A recent survey by American Express and SEMPO revealed that small and mid-sized businesses (SMB’s) are investing more in social media than in search engine optimization. Considering the challenges in measuring social media ROI, I was ambivalent about this finding. I mean on one hand I am not surprised businesses are really interested in social media. After all, it is what everyone seems to be entranced by. On the other hand, search engine optimization is such a powerful tool to actually generating leads and it can be more easily measured.

GroupM Search and comScore, two reliable sources of research about online buying behavior, recently released findings of a new study that focused on the impact and search and social media, and the synergy of each channel. The results were quite interesting and may provide insights that could alter your current search and social media strategies. A meaningful excerpt from the study revealed the following:

Going through some of the finer points in Google Analytics - Conversion University caused me to ask "why don't more people embrace the richness of web analytics data?" I think about some of our clients and many people I run in to who are struggling to be effective marketers and then I look at the power of the data you can get from Google Analytics. I just shake my head in amazement that more aren't embracing the data.