Inbox Roundup 052907

While I don’t always have time to read the email newsletters on search marketing and interactive that I find filling up my inbox, there are those moments of RSS reading weakness when I revert to my old email ways. Here are a few articles of interest from today’s search marketing email newsletter crop.

The Death of the Page View – Dave Friedman tells the tale of the dying page view metric over at Chief Marketer, citing AJAX, RSS and widgets as the primary culprits. Funny, it’s those three that are making the web more interesting again. Suggested alternatives include: AJAX metrics and time-based ad serving as well as user-participation metrics such as comments left or number of media submissions. One thing is for sure, social media presents interesting challenges for metrics.

David Berkowitz offers some good humor in his post at Search Insider, “Baby Name Optimization“.

Online Video Nabs Consumer Response – eMarketer reports on Kelsey Group’s “Online Video: A New Local Advertising Paradigm” report, saying online video may be a good outlet for small businesses, especially in comparison to pay per click. Six in 10 adult consumers say they watch online video. Seems like online video as a marketing channel is the one to watch.

Golden Rules of Linkbaiting – Possibly the most comprehensive collection of linkbaiting resources collected in one page from Smashing Magazine, which is in and of itself, some nice link bait.

iMediaConnection ponders whether Facebook is the New MySpace? and going by the recent opening of Facebook along with the flurry of activity over the weekend, Facebook might just be poised to take off even more.

To RFP or not to RFP, that is the question – Sara Holoubek at DMNews lays it out that while RFPs are no fun for vendor or client, they do serve a useful purpose. For the most part, search marketers detest RFPs and many won’t respond to them. But if you don’t engage in the RFP process, you’ll never know if the project is a fit. Sara suggests there’s too much smoke and mirrors describing search marketing vendor services (and in what industry is that NOT true?) and that doing a better job of describing services and product comparisons, the less need there would be for RFPs. I hate to say it, but with the constant state of change in the industry, I’m not sure any kind of normalized comparison will persist.