Over at Adotas, Mike Troiano of matchmine wrote about why Twitter is becoming popular and it will eventually be used as a marketing medium.

He described Twitter as blogging for people with ADD -- it's a service that sends text messages or IMs in short bursts throughout the day. You subscribe to your friends "stream of conciousness" thoughts, and Troiana argues that it is popular because it is raw and unfiltered.

I agree with the him about the need for information that is not written in marketingspeak, and many bloggers have trouble ditching their corporate lexicon when they write (as I've just proven).  Marketers will want a piece of the action as Twitter's audience grows, and they'll have to adjust their pitches to be less like marketing if they want to avoid rejection from the Twitterati.

It’s time to come to terms with the fact that we cannot and should not keep our “Work” and “Home” lives in separate boxes. There’s one you – just like everybody else – and in the end making the leap of faith required to expose that real, flawed, whole person is the key to understanding not only social networking, but the spiraling number of people who participate in it every day.

However, some people can't separate themselves from their work, and it can be unhealthy. You are the same person all day, but you don't need to be following the lives of your peers as if they were living an episode of 24.  Marketer involvement might be just the cure for those who are becoming Twitter addicts.

While LinkedIn has always appealed to more of a business audience, Facebook is also becoming more friendly to professional purposes.

LinkedIn is now offering corporate snapshots by mining the data that its users offer about where they've worked. This data -- which can be useful for marketing purposes and job seekers alike.

According to the SF Chronicle, you can search on where people from companies such as Yahoo worked before and after through new corporate profiles.

Facebook hasn't catered to the corporate crowd directly, but the ability to create groups for companies and their "communities" can be an effective communication tool. Also, Facebook's APIs provide developers with the tools to create value added services for sharing info.

This will open the doors from the old boys network to a younger generation who will similarly leverage their connections to find new jobs and business partners. From blogs to instant messaging to now social nets, the business world eventually catches up with online tools.

When it comes to alcohol and credit financing, overindulgence can be sickening.

While the current recession and mortgage crisis are reported in depth, what is not getting enough attention is the role of credit cards and how easy it is for Americans to obtain credit and spiral into debt that is now undermining our economy.

New rules regarding the marketing of credit cards and regulations in credit policies could be reality in the near future.

Everyone is blaming the mortgage lenders, but the credit card industry is equally to blame. People need look no further than their mailboxes for a bevy of credit cards with predatory interest rates. As people get in over their heads with debt from their homes and personal spending, credit continues to be available, but at higher rates of interest.

And if people miss a payment, the interest rates can double to more than 30 percent, which makes it nearly impossible for many people to make a dent in the principal due on their balances. This results in foreclosures.

In the U.S., adults are owned by and average of five credit cards each while in most of the world, less than half of the population and in many cases less than 1 in 10 have a single credit card.

If we want to avoid future credit crunches, credit card addicts should be cut off from their "dealers" more quickly. A maximum interest rate -- say 20 percent -- would go further in avoiding bankruptcies and foreclosure than the rules that are being changed regarding sub prime mortgages.

The Internet has been the worst thing for newspapers since television, and publishers are teaming up to turn their websites into assets. Overall revenue at newspapers have been in a downward spiral for a decade as online revenue hasn't kept up with print losses.

Quadrantone is a new ad network started by Gannett, Hearst, Tribune and others that aggregates the audience from categories including health, business news, technology, sports, personal finance and auto. These broad verticals give advertisers the chance to reach millions of readers in a category.

The keys to success for this venture are the ability to track and target users across the network and to geotarget users.

The biggest newspaper sites reach national audiences, and publishers need to target their audience based on where the people are reading. I visit the newspaper websites from 5 different cities on a regular basis, is your experience the same? Many former Chicagoans still read the Tribune and people from all over the country read the NY Times. Targeting readers in Orange County -- no matter which newspaper they are reading -- allows the network to charge higher CPMs.

Allowing these users to be tracked across publisher sites allows the network to avoid repeated ads and observe behaviors. For example, people may read auto news on several websites, and that information must be captured for the network to succeed.

Quadrantone has only been around for a month and so far the website doesn't mention targeting. Hopefully the advertisers and publishers are asking these same questions.

Via Yahoo News.

Howard Dean may have started the Internet age of political fundraising and grass roots support, but this year, the web has taken over all aspects of campaign communications. From bloggers who live and breathe politics and do valuable research to YouTube to campaign sites, the most influential information is being delivered online.

Every gaffe or dramatic speech is amplified through hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube. Every skeleton from a candidate's closet will often first be unearthed on a blog, and then eventually make its way to the mainstream press and TV.

Campaign sites have become money machines for Ron Paul and Barack Obama because they enable people to feel engaged.

So what can marketers glean from this?

Take advantage of the medium, and most importantly, monetize it. If websites will have a large impact on who sits in the oval office, then it can certainly help product sales and should be valued appropriately when setting ad rates. While we can get lost in the numbers about page views, the Internet is shaping opinions, getting people to spend their money and devote their attention to serious. What more can you say to people stuck in a dead tree world of its importance?

Via Adotas.

With more and more people watching their favorite shows online (and nearly all shows now being streamed), the folks at Nielsen should start combining the ratings into a single audience.

This will enable the networks to sell across platforms and give credibility to Internet viewers. The Internet data is more valid because unlike Nielsen's survey of a small fraction of households, this is actual shows watched, and they can track if people watched the entire show including the ads.

The networks are gradually getting over their air of superiority in selling TV ads and realizing that the growth will be online. Instead of discounting the web audience, the should embrace it because the demographics skew younger and more affluent -- exactly what they want to sell to advertisers.

A view of Lost online on Friday morning is just as valuable as a prime time view. Legitimizing the online audience will also enable the networks to more easily sell related "web only" content such as behind the scenes video and actor interviews.

Via MediaPost

Video ad network BrightRoll now offers high definition (HD) ads to PC users. The company says advertisers can use the better image quality of HD on computers more easily because of a higher penetration of HD-ready screens (65 percent to 33 percent for TV).

TV advertising is down because of writer's strikus interruptus, so BrightRoll is wooing the same crowd to go online.

However, someone in the creative department forgot to let the people who run BrightRoll's website that this was coming. The website has no examples of HD ads or does not acknowledge that the new ad unit exists. If you want to charge a premium for HD advertising, the least you could do is show something on your website to convince people to buy. Tsk tsk.

DoubleClick has created widget technology for virally distributing rich media ads. The new platform enables ads to be posted as widgets to social networking sites or onto personal home pages.

If you haven't recognized this shift towards ads-cum-widgets yet, this announcement by one of the biggest ad networks makes it official. Widgets are superior to traditional ads because they bring some value for the reader -- through video, interactive games or custom content delivery. People will want to interact with them and host them on their sites, which you can't say about 99 percent of existing ads.

DoubleClick quoted eMarketer as saying that the number of marketers who will use widgets will more than double to 47 percent of the market, and I'd say it will be more than 50 percent, and most companies targeting the under 45 demographic will play with widgets.

Gigya's Wildfire technology is powering DoubleClick's technology. Widget software developers who are masters at javascript, RSS and XML will be in high demand this year as I know that many other ad networks are moving in this direction.

Similarly, widget provider ClearSpring just signed a deal to provide widgets to Hearst Publications.

We can all drool over Wikipedia's dominance of organic search results. Or, better yet, copy its legitimate SEO strategy and reap the benefits.

The smart folks at E-Consultancy wrote about how Wikipedia has mastered SEO because of the way the site was structured, and all of us in the content biz can learn from this.

Patrick Altoft mentions the importance of file names, title pages and descriptions, as well as the significant factor of internal linking.

Being self-promotional in a way that does interrupt the content can be both useful to the reader and very helpful in SEO. "Deep linking" and creating site maps can get to the niche keywords that can spell traffic success. We can't all be Wikipedia, but we can take a page from their pages.

Comscore reports that the print and online news readership have a somewhat inverse relationship. Readership of news online is heaviest among the younger crowd while print readership grows as the audience ages.

This is bad news for those who make their living selling print ads, but good news for their online counterparts. Overall revenue for papers continues to slump, but that's because online news continues to rely on the banner ad -- a tough way to make a living.

Newspaper sites such as the LA Times and NY Times have young readers who comeback day after day but they have yet to turn that loyalty into higher value than the CPMs of generic ads. If the audience online is different a different approach to selling is needed.

More video ads, targeted ads based on demographics, and interactive advertising that is focused on the under-40 crowd are needed. Other options include sponsorships and pay per action campaigns that offer advertising something more. Younger folks like to read blogs and view news videos as part of the news consumption, and newspapers are answering that need. But they have to get beyond the banner as the ad solution if they want to grow revenues.

Via MediaPost