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This is a post on why you should give back to the blogsphere in order to reap more benefits than you have every in the past for your blog. The truth is in order to build a big blog community you have to give. If you do not your blog will be sent to the blog basement to never be seen from or heard from again.

I took it upon myself to get some answers using Facebook's own ad targeting system and I created this abridged guide for marketers to give you a snapshot of what the real face of Facebook looks like on a Global and US level.

This is a report that I will be updating on a monthly basis to show how the population is changing and how marketers can respond. Is there anything else that you want to see?

Direct response marketing is when you engage in some type of advertising or marketing effort which targets a market with an offer.  The offer is such that response can be measured.  Direct contact is made from the prospective customer to the marketer.  Many B2B lead generation activities fall into the direct response category. Direct marketing is when you target a named company, title, or individual with an offer.  Contact is made from the marketer directly to the prospective customer.  As with direct response, the offer can be a variety of things including attendance, discussion, communication, inquiry, etc.  And response can be measured.  In complex sales environments, direct marketing is closest aligned to sales and sales activities.

If you are thinking about doing a virtual conference or tradeshow, you might want to read Best Practices in Virtual Events, a white paper created by The FactPoint Group, a Silicon Valley-based research, and consulting firm, for Unisfair, a provider of virtual trade shows, expos, conferences and marketing events.

This paper attempts to encourage a better dialogue between research on social influence and on negotiation. It provides an overview of the literature on both areas, and identifies opportunities for creating more effective and useful research. First, HBS professors Deepak Malhotra and Max Bazerman identify those elements of psychological influence that do not require the influencer to change the economic or structural aspects of the bargaining situation in order to persuade the target. Second, they review prior research on behavioral decision-making in negotiation to identify those ideas that may be relevant to influence in negotiation. Third, they provide a framework for thinking about how to leverage behavioral decision research to wield influence in negotiation. Fourth, they consider how targets of influence might defend against these tactics. Fifth, because psychological influence is, by definition, aimed at achieving one's own ends through the strategic manipulation of another's judgment, they consider the ethical issues surrounding its application in negotiation.

Many preference centers are great ideas that are poorly executed -- not because the registration page isn't functional or the users can't update their profiles, but because of  mismatched expectations.  When many marketers are still grappling with permission management practices (opt-in vs. opt-out), why add another layer of consumer management to the problem? 

A panel run by David Armano on Social Media in a B2B world had a panelist from Leopardo Construction, Todd Andrilik. Todd, who’s the company’s director of marketing and PR, is using a wordpress blog as a newsroom .

It was a huge event, with close to 2,000 participants and a palpable energy and a sense of - finally - progress. The conference was attended by the ministers for energy or senior political representatives  from several countries (the UK, Germany, several Nordic countries - see the link above) and happened at the same time as an important German government meeting that decided to increase offshore tariffs to 14c/kWh, a strongly supportive measure which is likely to be the starting point of a massive wave of investment in the sector in that country. Interestingly, despite that decision, and the excitement it generated, the UK market is still seen as likely to be bigger than the German one over the next 10-15 years, with all other markets being somewhat smaller.

With tongue in cheek and apologies to the Wal-Mart version we have all heard, please consider these thoughts that are sure to help us NOT achieve sustainability in 2008.

In a follow-up to his now-legendary TED2006 presentation, Hans Rosling demonstrates how developing countries are pulling themselves out of poverty.

Ray Silverstein, the “Sales” columnist at Entrepreneur.com and president and founder of PRO: President’s Resource Organization, a network of advisory boards for small-business owners, recently published an article on “Get More Referrals by Asking“.

According to a new white paper from the Council of PR Firms, in the next five years, “social media must become part of the way public relations practitioners do business or they will become obsolete.” From “Relating to the Public: The Evolving Role of Public Relations in the Age of Social Media,” available as a PDF here.

So I want you to do something that many traditional PR people think is nuts. I want you to design your online media room for your buyers.

Well it was only a matter of time before Slide and rockyou pushed things too far.  Facebook’s crackdown on aggressive viral tactics has exposed a key vulnerability of these businesses.  Facebook has banned some apps and shut down two of the three most important viral channels for others (invites and newsfeeds).  And according to this TechCrunch article the growth of these apps has been dramatically squeezed as a result. 

Last week I came across this 5 minute video featuring Seth Godin via a colleague. For me, what he says about Curiosity resonated very powerfully.

Yesterday, during one of our most widely attended webclinics ever, Dr. Mcglaughlin passionately talked about marketing to the post-modern consumer in 2008. In it, he stated a problem, puting it in the form of a protest to marketers from today’s average Internet consumer. He then proposed a response, which he put in the form of a creed, that he believes all marketers would be wise to adopt.

Therefore, I’m pleased that the Custom Publishing Council announces the first-ever but very timely conference in this emerging field, to be held in New Orleans March 9-11. The conference targets practitioners and solution providers alike and covers both strategic and practical aspects.

Earlier this month, I announced the Top 10 Blogs for Writers. I recently asked each of these stellar bloggers to pick their best posts on the topic of writing from 2007. What follows is pure gold. This is the best, direct FROM the best.

Today, MarketingSherpa released the 2008 edition of its Email Marketing Benchmark Guide. According to the press release: "the updated guide delivers exclusive results data from real-life marketers' campaigns. Containing 260-charts and tables, this is the largest and most comprehensive study ever conducted with professional email marketers. Readers will learn how the impact of email marketing has changed over the past year and how to overcome various future challenges of email marketing."

Content marketing is the technique of sourcing, creating and distributing relevant and valued content to attract, acquire, engage and enthuse a clearly defined and understood target audience with the objective of driving profitable customer behaviour.