Back in the good old days of, say, 2009, there used to be two separate things:  search engines and social media.  They were two separate destinations, two distinct marketing tactics, and were well on the way to becoming separate marketing specialties.  You didn’t really hear much – if any – talk about “convergence.” But a [.]. B2B Web Strategy Search Engine Marketing Social Media MORE >>

Sure, you “know” it is;  you can just feel it in your bones.  Plus there’s the odd war story of the customer who tells you they followed your email series for months, and used it as part of the justification for their purchase decision. Trouble is… keeping that series rolling takes a significant, very visible investment of [.]. MORE >>

But not so, says MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, which found that the only two marketing tactics to see an increased budget in 2009 were social media and email.  When social media invaded the online marketing scene a couple of years ago, many observers predicted that it would spell the end for email marketing. And [.]. MORE >>

We recently ran across an interesting survey of 500 small business owners nationwide, conducted by Network Solutions, LLC and the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business. Of some 15 Internet marketing categories, there were no statistically significant changes from the prior year …except for the use of social media, which was up by 12%! Of [.]. MORE >>

In contrast, the researchers behind Business.com’s “2009 B2B Social Media Benchmarking Study” take as a given that social media usage has already gone mainstream, and believe that the more [.]. Most studies of social media use have focused primarily on the question of adoption, or the rate of conversion of B2B social media skeptics into users.  MORE >>