If you pause to think about how different business disciplines have evolved over the last several years, marketing comes to mind as having experienced the most dramatic change (aside from seeing CEOs in orange jumpsuits.)

What brought on the drastic change?  Much of this evolution is from 1) the increase and accessibility of new marketing channels and 2) the advancement of tracking and analytics.

But just how, exactly, has marketing evolved?  And how do your skills and strategies stack up?

From Corporate Speak to Human Speak.  A formal and polished tone has become a turn-off in almost all circumstances.  People now expect companies to show their own personalities – as if the company itself were a human being that they can relate to, communicate with and have a relationship with.  Companies have invaded our personal space as “friends,” and we expect them to behave as such.

From Cheesy Fluff to Plain Speaking. Good riddance to the era of marketing fluff.  It was fun for a while, until all those buzzwords started to melt together into one big indiscernible pot.  In today’s era of information overload, people look for companies to cut to the chase by using words and phrases they understand and can easily digest.

From Sell, Sell, Sell to Relationship Building. In years gone by it was challenging for marketers to track direct contributions to sales. Now that it’s much easier, marketers have realized what it takes in today’s world to get initial and repeat sales: relationships.  In fact, it’s all about relationships, and the most effective marketers today are successful at establishing these with diverse audiences across potentially vast geographies quickly and efficiently.

From Soap Box Pontification to Conversations. One-way is so last century.  Marketers of today need to facilitate two-way interaction and conversations with their communities.  Interaction and involvement have become the success metrics of many of today’s marketing campaigns.

From Self-Important Content to Generous Educator. Marketing content used to have the purpose of “let me tell you about me” or “enough about me; what do you think of me?”  We’ve all grown tired of marketers talking about themselves.  Marketers of today are educators to their audiences – providing knowledge, news and entertainment, with no strings attached.  They also want to hear what their customers’ wants and needs are — what their pains might be and how it is a brand can address that pain.

From Control to Openness. This has been quite a challenging leap for many organizations to make. Not having tight control over content is something that caused many old-school marketers to avoid the new era of marketing as long as possible.  The marketers of today have gone from tight image and brand control to leveraging external communities to help craft and spread a brand’s promise.  Marketers have learned that open reviews and community conversations build credibility with far greater impact than controlled content. Today’s success comes not from control, but from response.

From “Spray-and-Pray” to Results.  Metrics, metrics, metrics – knowing the real results of all marketing activities today is mandatory.  Failing to make measurable, profitable contributions to an organization is no longer acceptable.  Marketers today have much greater credibility thanks to this.

From Outbound to Inbound. Marketing used to focus on projecting an image and message out to prospects and customers.  The marketing of today has shifted to being easily found and drawing people into conversations, frequently through having sticky content that people love to share.

From Sneaky Intel to “Open Book” Competition. Marketers used to have to get pretty crafty about gathering good intelligence on what the competition was up to.  Today, the volume of data available about competitors is overwhelming.  Ironically, many are learning that the era of open competition is actually a tougher game to win than in era of secrets.

Slow-to-Change to Rapid Testing. There used to be enormous upfront time and resources spent on offers, messaging and content.  Mistakes in marketing had drastic consequences.  Successful marketers today spend much less up-front time, but are constantly testing new ideas and iterate quickly based on results.

From the Most-Stylish-Dude-in-the-Room to the Heart-and-Pulse-of-the-Company. Marketing is more active now on the front lines than many other company functions.  As a result, marketers can sense and respond to events before the majority of the company even knows something is up. Increasingly, marketers today are turned to as the most reliable source of market intelligence and a valuable contributor to strategic direction.

From a Narrowly-Focused Discipline to Leveraging All Employees and Beyond. The scope and responsibilities of the marketing function has grown tremendously in recent years, yet resources for marketing activities are proportionately more constrained.  But the good news is that everyone within a company can help with marketing these days: from blogging to tweeting to social networking, everyone in an enterprise can be a marketer today.  Which means the CMO doesn’t simply lead just those in his or her org chart; the CMO is a leader for everyone in the company — from the receptionist to the CEO — because each person has a marketing role to play.

Personally I’m delighted with the changes.  It’s nice to dust off the orange cheese ball dust once in awhile, but no one listens to that stuff any more. Authenticity, honesty, transparency, connection: these are the watchwords for the 21st century.  Give them a try in your marketing efforts.

Everyone has gone social: you, your competitors, your partners, your customers, your leads, your friends–everyone.  So now what?

It’s time to set up a system to mine all of the qualitative data that is floating around out there and put it to good, practical use.  Try using this list of 13 truly useful things you can actively learn from monitoring social media:

1. Who’s in bed with the competition?

Who’s blogging favorably about them?  Who’s providing them with good reviews?  Who’s following them on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and active in their community?  Who’s presenting with them on webinars and co-sponsoring collateral with them?

Get some good monitoring going on around your competitors names, and keep an eye on their online reviews and their social media account followers and activities.

Find their biggest fans and start to court them away.  Everyone knows how big a competitive win is – but a competitive win who is loud in the social media world is the biggest competitive win of all.

2. Who loves you?

Similar to above, who’s blogging about you? Tweeting about you? Commenting about you on Facebook? Giving you positive reviews?

It’s standard practice to reward someone who refers you new business, so make it standard practice to reward those who are essentially referring you to the masses.  Provide these “fans” with some appropriate reciprocal love.  Perhaps it’s a link back, or a coupon or some other offer.  But make sure you let anyone who speaks positively about you know that you are listening, you really appreciate it and you’d love it if they do more!

3. What do people love the most about you?

Monitor trends in positive mentions about you in reviews, blog posts and other social media channels such as Twitter.

Sometimes what we may think are our biggest selling points are not what people love us  for most.  Pay attention to what people like  best about you, and start to actively promote those.  One technique we like is to actively call them out in your search ads using quotations.  Quotations lend more trust than just touting yourself, plus it will be in your audience’s own words.

4. What do people dislike the most about you?

While you’re poring through all of your praise, also start to document trends about any negative comments, or “if they only had….” comments.

Use “if only they had” information to inform your product development, road map and / or inventory adjustments.

5. What are your competitors hiring for?

Keep an active query in your reader (i.e., TweetDeck or HootSuite or Seesmic) that monitors job postings for your competitors.

One of the biggest hints about what they are up to next can be inside of those job postings.  Many companies are surprisingly candid about direction and weaknesses inside of their postings.

6. What are your competitor’s future plans?

Along those same lines, keeping an active query in your reader that includes your competitors name along with the word plans or powerpoint or pdf docs.

Many companies are surprisingly lax about what gets out into the web, you’ll be surprised about how much free competitive intelligence will flow your way.

7. Negative keywords for PPC campaigns.

Keep a query of your head keyword terms inside of your reader and monitor the headlines and themes of blog postings and news articles that are coming in.

Add anything and everything that isn’t relevant to you as a negative keyword in your ppc advertising campaigns.

8. New target keywords for PPC campaigns.

Same query as above, but this time monitoring for new ways people are talking about your space, or new needs and reasons that are rising up.

Take advantage of these by adding them in as new target keywords to always have your PPC campaigns on top of current trends.

9. Who are the influencers and thought leaders in your space / area?

Same head terms query – both of blogs and also of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Use this to identify who the big influencers are online in your space.  Then, make them your best friends and court them to talk about you.

10.  Hot topics for blogging

With that same head terms query, you can easily get a pulse for what is trendy.

Use trends to write blog posts about with your own opinion, expertise, and helpful information.  When you promote trendy blog posts, they will garner you the most value.

11.  Audience profiling

Where is your audience and how do they participate?  Do they blog? Do they write reviews on local sites? Do they attend webinars?  Do they download podcasts? Are they active on FourSquare, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo Questions or other communities?

Monitoring your audience’s activities and where they are most prevalent will help you figure out where to spend your precious marketing dollars and dedicate your marketing content and time.

12.  What should your Sales Tools & Collateral address?

What don’t they like about you? What is your competition promoting as their biggest advantages?  What are the current hot topics and needs?

Develop sale collateral around these so your sales force is always armed with the latest and greatest sales objections they are likely to run into and the most prevalent ways of discussing the current market climate and needs.

13.  Link building opportunities

Did someone mention you, but forgot to include a back link?

Reach out to them and kindly request that they add a link!

It’s all free data, so start to make social media one of your best sources of information today!

Search marketing is the fastest, most affordable way to stay on top of market trends.  In order to make the most out of every search marketing dollar that you spend, we’ve outlined some important data you should review regularly to inform other, parallel marketing efforts and to insure optimal performance across all your marketing channels.

Data From PPC / Search Network Results…

To SEO:

Keywords that are Popular and Bring in the Most Relevant Traffic. This will help you know not only what keywords to target, but, can also save you money if you optimize your SEO for the highest traffic PPC keywords.

To PPC:

Negative Keywords from Actual Search Queries that Triggered PPC Ads. When clicks occur on search queries that are irrelevant you are throwing money out the window- so monitor the search queries that are bringing in the clicks and be sure to add any irrelevant terms to your negatives keywords list.

New Keywords from Actual Search Queries that Triggered PPC Ads. There are so many different ways of saying the same things, so it’s important to monitor the terms your audience is actually using to search for your products.  This list of actual search queries can especially be a gold mine of new keyword opportunities if you are using broad match – it can be one of the easiest ways to move into longer-tail terms with lower CPCs and better conversions.

To Marketing Strategy:

Hot Geographies, and also geographies to not focus on.  Monitor your PPC activity and results by geography.  This will give you indications of where to focus your marketing dollars and where to avoid additional spend.

Hot Offers.  Monitor your PPC ad CTRs to see which offers generate the most interest and which offers searchers don’t seem very interested in.  This will help you know what offers to emphasize in your other more expense marketing channels.

Product Popularity.  PCC traffic trends are a great way to see which product areas are hot and deserve more marketing dollars and which product areas have little interest and might even be candidates for sun setting.

To Website:

Hot Taglines & Calls to Action.  If you want to know the best content especially around calls to action to include on your website – your PPC ads can be the best indicators.  See what calls to action get the highest CTRs and which ones are ignored and you’ll have a great head start on the content to use in your website itself to garner action.

To Social Media:

Hot Product Areas.  Where should you be emphasizing your social voice – through blogs and social sites?  PPC keyword and search query trends can be a great indicator of hot areas of interest vs. areas which won’t garner much interest in social activity.

Market Feelings.   Searchers frequently include their feelings in their search queries.  Mining these feeling keywords can be a gold mine for relating to your potential audience and the current issues they are facing.  These feeling keywords can be a great way to grab a searchers attention through a blog title or other social post.

Data From PPC / Content Network Results…

To Marketing Strategy:

If you are running an automatic placement or re-targeting campaign these are a great way to identify popular websites that potential and past customers frequent.  You can use these to determine associations that might be valuable to join or thought leaders that you might want to incorporate into future events.

To SEO:

With the automatic and re-targeting campaigns, you can also generate a great list of popular websites which are complementary and relevant to your site and fantastic link building opportunities.  Showing a website the stats of visitors who take interest in both of your sites is a very compelling way to conduct manual link building.

Data From Natural Search Results…

To PPC:

New Keywords from Actual Search Queries. Monitor your logs to see how people are searching for your products.  Be sure to include all these different flavors in your ppc campaigns.  It has been shown that having a ppc and seo listing on the same page greatly improves the overall CTR for those keyword terms.

To SocialMedia:

Blog Keywords and Topics. Your natural search query list is also a goldmine for finding out hot topics to write blog and other social media entries for.

To Marketing Strategy:

Hot Geographies.  Natural search traffic data by geography is another great source for identifying geographies to place more emphasis on and those to ignore.  The natural search geographies can frequently carry surprises about areas you didn’t expect to get great traffic from, since they are not restricted like they are in PPC.

Data from Google Alerts / Social Monitoring…

To PPC:

Negative Keywords. Monitoring alerts for hot current topics for which you don’t want your ad to appear.

New Keywords. Monitoring alerts for hot current topics for which you do want your PPC ads to appear.

To SEO:

Websites for Link Opportunities. Monitoring current blogs postings, news articles and other social posts can provide great indicators of potential complementary websites for link building opportunities.

Link-bait Content. Monitoring trends can give you great ideas for what type of content is most likely to be successful link bait.

To Social:

Be the News Source for Your Clients. Being on top of breaking news and the latest trends will enable you to be the first one to push out new news information to your social followers and enable you to have the blog postings on the hottest topics.

To Marketing Strategy:

Thought Leaders. Monitoring the news, social and blog worlds is a great way to identify thought leaders for you to develop relations hips with and to leverage in marketing events.

Newsletters, Blogs to Regularly Monitor. To make sure that your staff is always up to date, monitoring thought leaders is a great way to identify what blogs and news feeds your staff should be regularly reading updates from to ensure everyone is always up to date on the current market pulse.

Many larger, more matrixed marketing organizations manage many of these functions in separate silos, and understanding the impacts of one tactic on other, related tactics can be difficult due to organizational structure or dysfunction.  It would be in the best interests of these kinds of organizations, however, to improve interdisciplinary communication and cross-pollination in order to achieve a more effective marketing strategy.  Try sharing your portion of the data first with teams across different organizations in order to start opening up the communication lines and collaboration.

Marketing data from every aspect of your overall effort can positively impact a whole range of related and unrelated marketing and sales tactics.  It’s important to listen to that data, and to appropriately apply what you learn to every aspect of your marketing program.

The search marketing world creates interesting situations where ethical lines can get stretched quite a bit. For instance, in the search marketing world information is public. Yet unscrupulous actions can be taken anonymously — a scenario too tempting for many a desperate competitor. We run into many clients who have been unethically pursued by a competitor. Unfortunately, there are no comprehensive policing capabilities out there, and complaints about suspected competition fraud are frequently ignored.  Still there are things you can do to protect yourself and you should never stoop to the level of an unethical competitor to retaliate — in the long run, there are always consequences for unethical behavior.

First, let’s look at some all-too-common non-ethical examples. These just don’t pass the red-face test:

Competitors clicking on your pay-per-click ads.

First, it must be stated that most often we find that this one is mostly paranoia. And it can be tough to prove.  However, if you are sure this is happening to you, there are some proactive measures you can take. For example, you can exclude specific geographies or even IP addresses from your pay-per-click campaign to prevent competitor from viewing your ads. Just be careful not to lose out on new leads due to worries about competitors.

Competitors writing false negative reviews.

This one is always heart-breaking for us to hear, but desperate competitors have been known to do this quite aggressively. What can you do? Comment back. Try to address the issues as if they are real to see if they stop. If not, try reaching out to the site where they are being posted. Some sites will work with you on removing false reviews. Also, try to get your customer base incentivized to post positive reviews about you, so that good and real customer feedback is much more prominent than your unethical competitor’s words.  Customer loyalty will always overwhelm unethical competitive behavior.

Competitors using your trademark in their ad copy.

You don’t want your competitor using your product or company name in their ads – particularly in a negative context. This one requires you to protect your trademarks. Monitor for improper or illegal usage of your trademarks and file complaints of any violations the search engines. Ads that infringe on your trademarks will be disallowed from appearing by the search engines.

Next, let’s look at some examples of ethical competitive maneuvering, but which can also be abused:

Tools focused on “spying” on your competitors.

The word “spying” makes you think you might be doing something unethical. However, most of these tools focus on providing information that is publicly available, but also often difficult to aggregate for an individual.  One other aspect to consider here is how the spy-tool company is gathering data – so make sure this is an approved method for data collection. For the most part, this is an okay strategy for supplementing your online competitive knowledge; however, much of the data should be taken with a grain of salt. We haven’t yet come across a tool that has spot-on accurate data, or data that isn’t very stale. Still, many can tools can provide general information that can help you develop robust sets of competitive keywords.

Attending competitor’s webinars, downloading white papers, taking free trials, and subscribing to feeds.

These are examples of information companies make available to the public — including their competitors. However, if you are attending an online event or downloading information using a false name or false credentials, then this crosses the ethical line. However, if you access this information, and are honest about who you are, there isn’t any problem with taking advantage of information being supplied by your competitors.  In fact, in this world of blogs and data sharing and Twitter streams, there are plenty of ethical ways you should be maintaining knowledge of your competitors — believe me: they’re staying abreast of all your activity.

Advertise on your competitor’s brand name.

Add in your competitor’s brand name and products names as keywords in your Google PPC campaigns, and have your ads show for those. This helps to make sure that potential customers give you a peak as they consider your competitor.  Just be sure NOT to use your competitor’s brands in your own ad copy — that would be unethical.

Review your competitor’s ad copy.

Check out your competitor’s ad copy. This is a great way to stay on top of their offerings and what they think their competitive advantages are. Keep up here to make sure that your offer is unique and your offers are truly competitive.  However, never copy a competitor’s ads verbatim.  Focus on your own unique points of differentiation in ad copy that’s all your own.

Review your competitor’s website (including view source).

Keep tabs on your competitor’s websites. Extensive reviews here can provide you with a wealth of information about their offerings, their clients, their management, their value proposition, etc.  If you want to know what keywords they are targeting to rank highest for on natural search, click to “view source” of their webpage. Many people have their keywords listed right in their meta keywords tag. But if the keywords aren’t there, check out frequently used words in their page title tags, H1 tags, meta descriptions and content to get a feel for where they are focusing. You might choose to go head-to-head with them, or you might choose to branch out into different words to capture searches they are missing out on.

Read your competitor’s reviews.

What are people saying about your competitors? What do they like? What don’t they like? Make sure to keep tabs on feedback trends so you can improve your own standards in areas where you don’t think you align.  For instance, if your competitor is consistently praised in reviews for excellent customer service, and you’re not, well… you know what you need to do!

It’s okay to be a fierce competitor and to maintain tabs on what your key competition is doing.  Refrain from crossing ethical lines, and you’ll always be engaged in a good, clean fight.  And when you encounter a competitor whose ethics cross the line, use established channels to put a halt to it.

Every business around the world, whether big or small, knows exactly what happened in the Great Recession: consumers became (understandably) spooked by the global collapse of once-solid financial institutions and stopped spending.

A new report by Yield Software investor WPP, the world’s largest communications services group, concludes that, despite widespread hardship over the last 18 months, the sky did not fall.  And better yet: consumers know it.  Playbook 2: The Sky Did Not Fall, the second report in a series developed by WPP’s global retail practice The Store, concludes “wallets are open.”

“But only a crack,” said David Roth, CEO of The Store for Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia.  “Consumers are purchasing primarily to fill basic needs.  They’re tentative about the state of the economy and are ready to snap their wallets shut at the least provocation.”

In its first report, published last winter, The Store research concluded that consumers were moving through the three stages of grief: (1) acute distress, (2) acceptance, and (3) moving on.  Last winter, according to the report, consumers were still in stage one, which was characterized by anger and sadness.  The current report concludes that consumers are now solidly in stage two — indicated by the fact that they are shopping again and relieved that the sky did not fall.  But though the world avoided a total economic meltdown, consumers are nevertheless chastened.

According to the report’s findings, consumers apparently understand that they now must make tough choices governed by resources available to them today.  Whereas in the past, consumers would ask themselves “What credit card should I use?”, they now ask “Which product should I buy?”

As consumer attitudes and behaviors shift, retailers are quickly retooling to match the new reality in two important ways:

First: Retail, the report says, is being re-engineered to be simpler for the supplier, retailer and consumer.

Second: In an effort to increase efficiency and control costs, “smaller and less” is replacing “bigger and more” in terms of store size and product range.

Other take-aways from the report include:

New purchasing mentality: Consumers have learned that sometimes the cheaper brand is good enough. Unless they are convinced that a product is tangibly or emotionally better, they will select the less expensive alternative and pocket the difference.

Expanded presence of online: The decline in the product range found in stores will be accompanied by the coming of age of online and mobile retailing as more consumers click for product research, broader selection and the purchase reassurance found in online customer communities sharing product reviews and evaluations.

Greater reliance on brand strength: Discount is thriving in this economy, which is no surprise. The most important determinant of success, however, is not the sector served but the strength of brand equity.

Accelerated growth of new media: The fast-fragmenting media world offers new opportunities—and dangers—for brand promotion. Mass merchant customer databases and direct access to consumers positions mass merchants to become influential media owners at the expense of traditional players.

Bottom-line: even as the economy continues to strengthen, the shift in consumer attitude and behavior won’t be easily reversed.  The old adage, “once burned, twice shy” applies to both consumers and the retailers who are adjusting to better serve them.  The new consumer reality will be with us for some time to come.

There are a growing number of excellent tools and services – most of which are free for the basic versions – that can help you to determine how you stack up relative to your competition.  This includes everything from PPC campaign intelligence, to SEO, to social media attention.

Knowledge is power.  Take some time to understand where you stand relative to your competition; consider everything that you’ve learned; and then set out an action plan overcome any deficits you may discover.  Our Yield Web Marketing Suite can help you take action toward this end, including optimizing keyword lists and bids relative to what you’ve discovered your competition may be doing.

What follows is a list (which is by no means complete) of Web-based services that can help you understand the Web marketing mojo of your competition:

Google’s “Site:” Operator – Do a Google search for “site:competitor’sdomain.com” to get results for how many pages Google indexes and might therefore display as search results. By doing this, you can learn how big your competition’s site is and their ability to show up in multiple natural search results.

Google’s “Link:” Operator – Similarly, do a Google search for “link:competitor’sdomain.com” to learn the number of links Google is counting for your competition. While the list won’t show every link Google considers valid for calculating any one domain’s “link love”, you can get some great insight for what you may need to do build your own link love.

Compete – Offering a free version for their basic service, Compete shows how you stack up against your competition using their web site and traffic analytics tools.

Quantcast – Like Compete, Quantcast offers a free basic service that enables you to determine audience data, such as demographics, geographics, etc., for your own and your competitors’ sites.

Alexa – Alexa was among the first in the website analytics game and they’re an old favorite.  They show you website traffic for your own and your competitors’ sites, how those metrics have risen or fallen over time, and show you what other sites visitors went to.

SpyFu – Like the name implies, Spyfu peaks inside PPC campaigns to the extent possible to provide an estimate of how much your competitors are paying in their PPC campaigns. It also provides a snapshot of organic and paid keywords your competition is ranked for.

Google Alerts – This service is another old favorite.  Google Alerts are a great way to keep track of a competitor – what announcements they’re making, whether they’re included in press coverage, etc.

TweetDeck – This fun little Twitter dashboard service allows you to set up and save multiple searches for your own and competitor’s brands to see who’s tweeting what about each.  (You can also keep track of all your followers’ tweets and add your own from this great Adobe Air application.)

TweetVolume – Like Compete, Quantcast and Alexa, this service let’s you put in your own URL and those of your competitors to see how you stack up in the Twittersphere in terms of the share of voice your brand enjoys.

Technorati – enter the full URL of a competitor into the Technorati search box to get a sense of what the blogosphere is saying about them.  Then, do it for yourself and look at the differences.  If key bloggers writing about your market segment are paying attention to a competitor and ignoring you, this is actionable intelligence!

I hope these resources are useful to you.  If you have other suggestions for the list, send us a tweet via Twitter at @YieldSW.