Observing the CAN SPAM law and getting "delivered" are not the same thing. This article in Direct Magazine highlights some of the enormous difficulties that honest list mailers are having sending list mail to legitimate opt-in mailing lists. High performance senders need to do a lot more today to get their messages delivered, opened, read, and hopefully acted on.

A recent court ruling in Illinois has vast implications for direct marketers. And if there's one lesson DMers must take from the decision it's this: Rightly or wrongly, simply complying with Can Spam is not enough to get e-mail delivered. It doesn't matter if the sender's list is triple-verified-we-even-called-just-to-make-sure opt-in, if an Internet service provider decides a mailer's e-mail is spam and blocks it, the ISP has every legal right to do so.

Read the whole article in Direct Magazine

Gartner says smartphone sales to women doubled last year, and that these sales figures continue top grow at a faster rate than among men. We've known for some time that Japanese teenage girls were the most aggressive users of state of the art mobile communication devices in the world. We should not be surprised that western women would eventually discover the social and community enhancing powers of mobile technology. Mobile tech is simply not about geeks anymore, it's about community; having something to contribute, a need to participate, things to say, and to learn from each other. Clearly women have something powerful to bring to the table in this area.

In general, women may not be the earliest adopters of new gadgets or technology, this is true. However, as a New York Times article by Laura M. Holson tells us, that doesn't mean women haven't been scoping out the scene the whole time, waiting for their perfect moment to buy. They are experienced shoppers, and when they do go to make that purchase - they've already done all the research and will quickly become their new tech gadget's biggest fan!

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Sales of "smart" phones doubled in North America in the first quarter, outstripping the category's growth in the rest of the world, research firm Gartner, quoted by an Associated Press report, said.

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In the last year the number of American women using smartphones more than doubled to 10.4 million, growing at a faster pace than among men, according to Nielsen Mobile, which tracks wireless trends.

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Who are your site visitors likely to be, and what are they likely to be coming to your web site for? They're coming on a 'quest'; what is it? If you can figure this out, and create site content that fulfills your site visitor's quest, you have a chance of keeping them on the site long enough to realize what a great product you have. If you fail to figure this out you are probably wasting your time with your web site. It's all about 'relevance' these days. We're way beyond the idea that people "surf" the web looking for interesting and beautiful web sites. Today we know that most web traffic is mediated by 'search', and most search driven traffic is driven by an information 'quest'. Match the quest with the content of the site they land on after a Google search, and you have relevance... bingo!

As a part of a larger communications plan, an effective site has a specific job. (Notice here that I didn't say simple. Simple and specific are different things. Simple isn't always good for a site -- specific is.) The more specific the job, the more effective the site can be. On top of that, there's a bonus. The more specific the job for the site, the more creative your creatives can get with it. Specificity has always been a critical component of great traditional creative. Not only is that also true on the Web, it's magnified. Specific goals lead to better creative. Better creative leads to deeper engagement, which further boosts effectiveness.

Read more at Adotas.com

After years of hype the mobile advertising medium is starting to gain real momentum. Advertisers who are willing to invest in customizing their messages for this new medium are gaining real advantage in their markets, particularly with localization. The future belongs to mobil devices; if you doubt this just look at what your kids and their friends are doing with cell phones; the small size of the screen is no impediment to this group.

The differences between advertising on the mobile Internet and the PC-based Internet are due to the physical differences between the devices -- most notably the limited size of the interface, which creates new user habits and necessitates innovative approaches for those advertising on the mobile screen. This may seem obvious, but advertisers who recognize how to turn these differences to their advantage are far ahead of the game in mobile advertising.

Read the rest of the story at Adotas

If you have Flash on your web site you know how huge this development really is.

In a move that could add substantial volumes of Flash content to Internet search results, Adobe is working with Google and Yahoo to provide optimized Flash Player technology to enhance the searching of this content. The project, being announced Tuesday, will enable searches on Flash content to return text and links, which can then be indexed, said Justin Everett-Church, Adobe senior product manager for the Flash Player. Content from a Flash application or even a game or advertisement will be available to search engines. Pages containing a Flash .SWF file will be returned in a search.

Read the whole article in InfoWorld

Here's more evidence that we're going to be pushing more an more web content and web applications onto mobile devices; eventually everything will be delivered to small mobile devices that are decedents of your cell phone. The future belongs to the wirelessly connected "pocket computer", not the tethered desktop, or even the laptop computer.

Your laptop is likely to soon go the way of 5.25-in. floppy disks, made obsolete by smaller, more useful technology: the smart phone. Based on current trends for low-power chips used in devices like cell phones and iPods , we're likely to see eight times the CPU power in handheld devices by 2010 that we have today... The progress behind such advances isn't the overall boost in processing capabilities seen under Moore's Law (doubling the density of transistors on a chip every two years), Cockcroft said, but the increasing robustness of low-power chips and devices that use them. In other words: handhelds are advancing faster than laptops. For example, laptop memory capacity typically doubles every two years, while pocket devices are seeing such doubling annually.

Read the whole article at ComputerWorld.com

Imagine that you are traveling in an unfamiliar area and you need to know where to find a public rest room; or you need to locate a store that sells AA batteries. Or imagine that you would like to know if any of your friends are within a few blocks of you, so you can arrange a lunch get together. Or imagine that you are trying to figure out what that land mark building on your right is, as you drive from the airport into an unfamiliar city. By now we are all aware of in-car GPS devices that offer driving directions, but very soon, building on increasingly cheap and ubiquitous GPS technology, we will be immersed in a flood of amazing new 'location aware' services that will be deployed over GPS enabled smart phones. Not only will we always know where we are, but we'll always know where everyone else is as well.

With the imminent availability of the iPhone 3G, we're seeing the emergence of a new category of personal productivity applications that will prove as important as e-mail, word processing, and the spreadsheet: Location-aware applications, software that knows where you are and helps you take better advantage of what's around you.

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As mobile data becomes ubiquitous and wireless connection speeds climb higher and higher, the boundary between desktop and handheld is blurring more and more. Your cell phone is morphing into a mobile computer with an interface to the global network; an interface that is becoming as capable as your desktop connection. Combining this capability with social networking will usher in an explosion of localized personal social communication services that will reach deeply into all aspects of our lives.

Mobile social networks are quite popular with the Millennial generation, just as social networking is, reports In-Stat http://www.in-stat.com . Blogging, photo and video sharing, location-based socialization services, games, SMS, and IM will eventually be combined to afford the mobile user the entire social networking experience from a handset application, the high-tech market research firm says. The mobile handset will simply become an extension of the user in most aspects of life.

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Accessing the internet from smart phones and mobile devices is changing the game. While we have been watching for this development for some time, it appears that the necessary technical infrastructure is finally matching up with an audience in the marketplace. The mobil web is about to explode; is your web site 'mobile ready'?

The Nielsen Company today reported that mobile Internet extends the audience reach of many leading Internet sites by an average of 13 percent over home PC traffic alone. For some categories, such as weather and entertainment, the extended reach can be even greater. Nielsen's data show that for many Internet publishers, mobile Internet increases the overall size of their audience.

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As marketers scramble to figure out how to effectively spend suddenly smaller advertising budgets in an increasingly competitive marketplace, social media has become the hot platform for brand building, and "motivating consideration".

The looming economic downturn will inevitably lead to a decrease in ad spending, but marketers are likely to continue shifting money into social media, according to a new study. According to the Forrester Research report, marketer moves into areas like word of mouth, blogging and social networking will withstand tightened budgets. In contrast, marketers are likely to decrease spending in traditional media and even online vehicles geared to building brand awareness.

Those findings stand in contrast to the previous economic downturn, when spending on Internet advertising cratered as marketers turned to tried-and-true media.

Read the Article in AdWeek

In a down economy, it is important to integrate optimized landing pages with search marketing campaigns, and to use multivariate testing to increase conversions. Tools like Google Analytics greatly simplify this process, making it easier than ever know what visitors to your site are doing and — more importantly — why they are doing it. This article from Adotas does a good job outlining the benefits of this approach:

Go beyond traditional SEM tactics and turn your attention to the next critical step in optimizing your user experience -- the landing page, which is the page where search ads direct users for more information and, ideally, a conversion transaction. You don't have a fully optimized search campaign until you've optimized your landing pages and all other page elements your users encounter on their way to a conversion.

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A recent study commissioned by Google and conducted by Harris Interactive has found online media to be just as effective as traditional 30-second television spots for brand-building efforts.

Google tested the impact of running 30-second commercials from three major packaged goods categories - beverages, salty snacks, and skin care - on three different video platforms: conventional television, YouTube, and embedded in online content.

The study found that the commercials performed equally in all the major attributes on each of those platforms, but that embedded video ads might actually perform slightly better in terms of their ability to influence "purchase intent."

Read the Article at Media Post

The rise of Web 2.0 and user-generated content is having a profound effect on traditional marketing tactics. This article proposes that the 4 Ps - product, price, place and promotion - be replaced by the much more consumer-oriented 5 Ps: people, passion, processes, platform and partners.

When wholly, enthusiastically deployed, the new five Ps all work together - a passion for pleasing the person with whom you're doing business gives rise to new processes, the adoption of smarter platforms and value-adding partnerships that can make the promise of one-to-one marketing real.

The new FIVE Ps of Marketing

In 2008 marketers should avoid over-hyped opportunities and focus instead on measuring their campaigns' success, one satisfied customer at a time, according to Drew Neisser, CEO for US-based experiential marketing agency Renegade.
Neisser has published a "top ten" of marketing industry trends that will be worth considering during the coming year...

Drew Neisser on 2008 Trends