After building up a following of about 19 million active users, Twitter has finally revealed their plans for capitalizing on that massive audience. Company co-founder, Biz Stone, announced in his blog post this morning about Twitter’s new “simple” ad service – “Promoted Tweets” – to boost their company revenue.

Promoted Tweets are ads that will be shown on the top of the search pages that Twitter members use to find other members. There is nothing original in Twitter’s model. Facebook and Yahoo! are already gaining significant revenues from advertisements targeted at their audiences.

It should come as no surprise that Twitter has had no problem in attracting major advertisers to their site. The first wave of advertisers includes Bravo, Red Bull, Starbucks and Sony Pictures. You can expect many more big names to be added to this list shortly.

Of course, Twitter’s fan base has enjoyed the site so much because- in part- the site wasn’t crammed with advertisements. Twitter users must be asking themselves, “Will these promoted tweets be at all helpful for online businesses? And “Are these advertisers going to be haunting me every time I ‘tweet’?”

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What is Email Marketing?

If you have an email address, you’ve seen plenty of examples of email marketing. A clothing store might tell you about some new styles, a car dealership might let you know about a special financing deal, a local restaurant might let you know about new menu items.

Email marketing is a form of direct marketing which allows anyone to send messages directly to a pre-determined list of users. These messages can be anything from simple, plain text to rich, graphic-laden pages (similar to normal websites). Email marketing messages are delivered right to the recipient’s inbox, just like normal email.

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At the SMX East Ad Agencies discussion, a few of the panelists have discussed the problems they run into when they scale up SEO, particularly as part of a large company or a complex marketing plan.

Blue Fountain Media has approached the same problem—we work with large, Fortune 500 companies; we work alongside PR companies and ad agencies; and we often work with websites that use legacy software, and companies that face strict regulatory issues. Here’s what we’ve learned about integrating search engine optimization into larger campaigns.

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(source: Jason Nicholls)

Many companies are at a point where their brand identity in an on-line environment is static in an era of chaos. Things that used to work now don’t. Traditional branding has always been built on out-branding the competition in an ever-increasing advertising clutter-filled environment, media fragmentation, and the seemingly limitless choices that are offered in just about every product category.

Why do some companies “get it” and some are being left behind in the dust? Why are Nike, JetBlue, and Zappos the poster-children for companies that “get it”, and how are they achieving their social media success? Why is transparency so important? Will these things have a positive ROI and how do you measure it?

We have to remember that social media is just one piece of the puzzle and a component of branding. The following are things you have to remember when trying to build a strong brand interactively:

Listen:

I’ve mentioned numerous times that as a brand you have to actively listen. Create ego-centric searches on as many social media platforms as you can—Twitter, Facebook, Google Blogsearch, Friendfeed, Technorati. Read blogs and people’s comments—understand what people are saying, and always ask yourself why. Why are people saying what they say?
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Blue Fountain Media will be represented at Affiliate Summit NYC this year by head of marketing, Alhan Keser. The event which lasts from Sunday to Tuesday will consist of a panel discussions with insight on affiliate marketing techniques. If you wish to follow the news from the summit as it happens, follow Alhan via twitter or search twitter for the hashmark “ase09″.

NextUp NYC Panel (not the Final Five)

Last night, the BFM marketing team (@alhankeser, @ishquez, @zacksinkler, and I) attended Mashable’s NextUp event. Here’s a great summary of the NextUp speakers.

Just in case you were there for the presentations and not the audience, here are some of the folks you could have met at Mashable’s NextUp NYC last night:

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Now that we are officially in a recession (and have been for over a year), it is time to start spending money wisely. The oversized marketing budgets of the past are set to be replaced by smarter investments like search engine optimization of websites coupled with social media marketing.

Here a few reasons why it makes sense to invest in your website right now:

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With online sales at an all-time high, it seems Christmas has come early for RAG New York. The New York clothing company’s online storefront, RAGNewYork.com, continues to enjoy remarkable growth, even months after the conclusion of our search engine optimization efforts.  RAG has paid nothing for advertising since May, but they are still feeling the effects of SEO, in the form of ever-increasing website traffic, over 65% from search engines.

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Your domain name says a lot about what users should expect to see before they click on a search engine results, follow a link, or enter-in your url. You must be sure that your domain name suits your business and the expectations of your target audience. Remember to not limit yourself when picking your domain name. If you are selling one product one day and selling ten others a few years later, your domain name should be able to stay relevant.

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As reported by the New York Times on Sunday, the automotive industry has spent considerably less on tradition media advertising in this year’s first quarter compared to last year – $414 million less, according to TNS Media Intelligence. While local car dealers are being plagued by cash-flow problems and General Motors is reporting a greater-than-expected quarterly loss, the U.S.’s largest magazine publisher, Time Inc. is losing money.

Spending money on the Internet offers a number of advantages that have attracted the auto industry. Results are measurable, audiences can be easily and precisely targeted, and the price paid is for results – not Nielsen Ratings.