Forrester Research put out a great report on US Interactive Marketing Spend recently showing where marketers believe effectiveness will increase and decrease in the next three years.

The three biggest expected INCREASES were in Created social media, Online video and Search engine optimisation (SEO).

The areas predicted to have the biggest DECREASE in marketing effectiveness were Newspapers, Yellow Pages, Telemarketing and Radio.

(information sourced from SEOMOZ)

Marketers see greater potential in interactive channels

From Ben Parr at Mashable

We know that Twitter believes that businesses are central to helping grow and monetize the microblogging service; recent integrations with Citysearch and LinkedIn have foretold its interest in the space.

Today though, Twitter (Twitter) has begun to take its biggest steps in providing new features to businesses and monetizing those features. In a blog post, the company announced that it has begun beta testing its first feature made specifically for businesses: “Contributors.”

An explanation of the contributors feature

Contributors is a feature that focuses on creating more authentic engagement for business accounts. With Contributors, a business account with multiple contributors (say, for example, the @Twitter feed) can add the specific user that tweeted on behalf of the business to the byline.

Here’s Twitter’s explanation of the new feature in testing:

“The feature we are beta testing is called ‘Contributors’ – it enables users to engage in more authentic conversations with businesses by allowing those organizations to manage multiple contributors to their account. The feature appends the contributor’s username to the tweet byline, making the business to consumer communication more personal; e.g. if @Twitter invites @Biz to tweet on its behalf, then a tweet from @Twitter would include @Biz in the byline so that users know more about the real people behind organizations.”

The other big revelation by the company is that Contributors is just the first of several business features, some of which will be visible by users, and some which will be internal for businesses.

Twitter’s getting serious about ramping up its business presence. This may just be the beginning of the Twitter business model. We’ll have more answers soon enough.

Excerpt of Report by Jeanne-Vida Douglas. BRW Magazine

Technologies once limited to only the biggest budgets are now affordable for businesses of any scale. Here are five of the most rewarding. 

Information technology has been the biggest driver of productivity since mechanisation took over from manual and animal labour at the beginning of the industrial revolution.

Research from Finland suggests that access to simple data storage and processing computing facilities will increase the productivity of an average worked by 9 per cent a year; access to the internet will boost it by 14 per cent; mobile computing will increase worker productivity by 32 per cent.

Nonetheless, small businesses, which stand to gain the most from investing in It services, are often the most reticent to take advantage of the opportunities technology provides.

Unlike their larger counterparts, SMEs are often founded and run by specialists. The real estate agent, the carpenter and the distributor all know their trades, but don’t necessarily have the time to investigate emerging technologies or sit down to create a strategy for how a certain piece of software or hardware might make their businesses run more efficiently.

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