Whatever you do, whether it is being an online marketer, farmer, doctor, cleaner, teacher, zoo keeper - you will probably ask yourself 'How valuable is what I am doing?". You might ask this for your own personal satisfaction, or from worry abour your professional future. I of course often ask myself this same thing about all the services we here at MooMu Media provide.

• Is this the best we can do?
• Is this adding value?
• Will it continue to add value in the future?

So of course I was tickled pink when I came across this graph from Forrester research (from SEOmoz),  where they asked a group of marketers this question:



For marketing channels which are thought to be going to 'increase in effectiveness', all the highest increases were for the interactive channels (hooray!). Over 80% of marketers polled thought that SEO would increase in effectiveness (I agree).

Of course, the traditional methods shouldn't expect such an increase in effectiveness, as they have been long established and probably reached their zenith. However, the fact that they are getting quite high levels of expected 'decreases in effectiveness', doesn't bode well for them.

I just hope the cross section of marketers questioned weren't all the online marketers....

As YouTube explodes with submitted content, and there are more amateur musicians than ever able to broadcast their performance to the world, Google has spotted another opportunity and capitalised on it. (Actually Google Australia in this case, good on us).

Google Adwords for Video. (Promoted Video) allows you to buy adspace through Google Adwords, for your video, to try and increase viewership, rather than just relying on word of mouth and hope.

It works just like Adwords in that space is bought in an auction, and by keyword. You can even embed calls to action to your ad, like 'visit my website'.

And with more than 1 billion video's viewed on YouTube every day (according to Google Australia), it looks like their could be a potential market for this...

Check out the real estate that Bing allocates to PPC ads on it's search page:




Bing has four PPC entries above the organic results, with massive amounts of white space around them, which on my average laptop pushes natural results down below the fold. Why is PPC getting so much attention? Why does it get the best positions, and so much of them? Does it really work that well?

Anecdotally, you would think not. I can't think of one person that I know (who doesn't work in digital marketing), that would admit to clicking on the sponsored listings. People that I talk to seem to think that the ads aren't necessarily that relevant to their search. They look spammy, and people don't trust where the links might take them.

I would almost go so far as to say that people are developing 'PPC blindness' - ignoring the ads completely.

However, anecdotal evidence is not stacking up against the actual evidence. From clients accounts I have seen PPC bring tonnes of traffic, and valuable traffic too.

Why this disparity? I don't know! This isn't much of an enlightening post, just my own wondering. Do I live in such an odd segment of society that I don't come across the majority? Are people lying to me?

OK, I am slowly getting into Twitter. I realise I am one of the last people in the world to fall in love with it - well the digital marketing world anyway - but you can't say I haven't been trying with all the previous posts I have written on it.

There is a very particular thing I love about it though, and that is this - Configured correctly, Twitter is my own personalised, easy-updated, unspammed feed. It covers things that I am interested in, in short, easy to digest snippets, with relevant links attached.

When I look at my Twitter feed, I am seeing (just an example)

• Events in my area (Timeout)
• Updates from charities I am interested in
• Offers from service/product providers I love
• Australian news snippets (ABC)
• Online marketing articles I have chosen to follow (e.g. searchengineland)
• A peppering of humour, care of thefakestephenconroy

Using Twitter as a personal feed is useful so far, but is less useful when

• You follow too many people so that the pure number of updates mean you miss a large majority of them
• People post tiny URLs with NO hint on what they are about
• There are too many posts about minutiae that no one is interested in
• Use of too many #'s and @'s so you can't decipher what they are saying (or is that me being a late Twitter-adapter?)

Someone recently said that on Twitter you are linked to people you 'aspire' to be friends with, while Facebook is for people you are or used to be friends with. I guess that is what makes the Twitter feed so much more interesting! (No offence, friends).