A turn of a new decade invokes a reflection of trends from the past ten years, while stirring up curiosity as to what’s in store for the next ten. We couldn’t agree more with these 5 recommendations for online marketing in the new decade from Borrell Associates, a research and consulting firm that tracks and analyzes advertising and marketing trends:

1. Identify and copy the fastest-growing companies. The gap is widening between the “get it” and “doesn’t get it” companies. The ones who get it are growing fast. Watch – and copy – what they’re selling and how they sell.

2. Partner with someone. Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft and other tech companies are all hungry for local growth. So are local media companies that are partnering. The fastest-growing revenue streams are likely to come from partnership deals in 2010.

3. Use the Internet as a utility to tap faster-growing “non-advertising” marketing dollars. The amount spent on traditional advertising may be in perpetual decline. Monitor this trend, and start helping businesses where they’re spending more dollars – on the “non-advertising” side – including social networking, search engine optimization, promotions, rebates, contest and coupons.

4. Keep your hands on the wheel with mobile advertising. Mobile is the new disruptor, and absolutely worth experimenting with. But don’t over-commit resources. Like the Web 10 years ago, it will take several years for local advertisers to warm up to mobile en masse.

5. Capitalize on the transformation to video. Consumer comfort levels with Web-based video are high, and local advertisers are likely to follow in much larger numbers next year – not only buying up pre-roll commercials, but also buying longer “infomercial” type video embedded within online directories and inside banner ads.

Do you know what words get retweeted the most? Do you know which post titles get clicked on the most? How about what to include or exclude from your profile bio to gain more followers?

There are hundreds of webinars out there on the topic of social media; however, it is very difficult to find a webinar that is more of “how to” rather than a “what is” when it comes to social media. That’s why we’ve developed a webinar that really demostrates how to implement a successful social media strategy. Please keep in mind, this webinar is NOT simply an introduction to the concept of social media, but rather a step by step guide with tricks and tips, do’s and don’ts, and lots of resources to help simplify your social media plan.

Date: Friday, December 18, 2009
Time: 10:00am PST
Register here: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/896729841

After analyzing several studies conducted over the past few years regarding the ROI on email campaigns, I’ve put our findings here in a straight-forward summary on which days and times are the most effective to send emails. The best days to send emails depend on whether it is B2B or B2C.

The best day for B2B: Tuesday (the same as with social media blogs)

The best day for B2C: Friday

This chart, although from a study from 2006, is a simple visual and reflects similar findings to the latest studies.

The best time to send emails: 9 am
Unlike social media sites, emails, especially ones sent to a work email address, are more likely to be considered as high priority. Therefore emails get checked first thing in the morning.

• 9 a.m. performed 15.63% better than 4 p.m.

• 9 a.m. performed 9.4% better than 12 p.m.

• 12 p.m. performed 6.9% better than 4 p.m.

Some regions generally start their work day at 8am, therefore depending on your target market, sending emails as early as 8am is wise.

Click here to access the full case study (subscription required).

We previously talked about the best day to post, but what about the best time of day? The time of your post is important in order to have the most visibility, but also remember that it’s crucial to have your post re-posted or “retweeted” to allow your message to spread epidemically. Especially with micro-blogging sites like twitter, lots of posts get buried if not timed strategically. After researching this topic, I found many studies all confirming the results in the chart below. This is a study on Twitter; however, most social networking sites have similar results.

People are most likely to read your posts during these times:

The chart then falls after 5pm. Many people trade in their computers at this time for other things like happy hour, dinner, their families..etc. What’s interesting is that the gap of reading tweets and sending tweets declines as the day goes on, meaning that more people who are reading posts are also sending them. Are we more pensive in the evening, perhaps? Or maybe it’s because the evening gives us more time to ponder when writing our posts…?

According to new report by ViTrue, the best day to post to your Facebook Fan page is on Tuesday. Both Monday and Wednesday came in close, while Friday and Saturday were proven to be the worst days to get a response from posts.