We've seen some changes in the marketing industry in the last decade.  We no longer tell consumers what to buy with our marketing efforts, we advise them.  Potential customers are more inclined to listen and ask the advice of  their peers when it comes to determining their choice of not only what to buy, but where to buy.

In recent years with the advancement of social media marketing, word-of-mouth has become even more important, because your customers don't just tell a few people about a positive or bad experience, they often tell thousands if not millions.

This decade is coming to a close and it's a good time to review your own reward marketing program. Are you rewarding customers for telling others about you?

Referrals are the most powerful form of marketing that you can use and it's also the least expensive. Your referrals have more of an impact than any other marketing strategy or advertisement.

What does a referral mean to your business?  It's a warm lead to a sell of your product or service.  Don't dismiss the value of those referrals and be sure to reward those that send them your way - you'll be glad you did.

Your Turn: How do you reward people for sending those referrals in your direction?  I'd love to hear about your referral programs and how you reward customers for sending business your direction.

Real time search is now a reality. Google rolled out their new  real-time web and personalized search last week and the marketing world is buzzing about it.

Why?

Real time search is the integration of social media networking feeds into search engine query results.

What does this mean for you?

That's easy, it means that if you haven't embraced social media as part of your marketing plan, it's time to start if for no other reason than to protect your brand and monitor what's being said. The feeds that are being put into the search engine results don't necessarily have to come from your company; they can come from anyone.  That includes those who may be complaining about your service or your product and you need to be aware of the buzz, both the positive and the negative.

Protect your brand by gaining an understanding of what real time search is and what it means for you and your company.  You'll be glad you did.  Your brand is in the hands of your customers and that's now a real time search reality.

It's been a rough year for many of us that work in marketing.  We've had more pressure put on us to make things happen and increase the bottom line of the companies we own or work for.  Marketing is often looked at as an expense, rather than the investment that it is.  It's time that we start showing the return on investment that marketing plays in our businesses, the best way to do this is to create an annual marketing plan.

An annual marketing plan will assist you in figuring out what it is that you need to do, how to do it, and when to do it. This marketing plan should go hand-in-hand with your business plan and development.  It keeps you and your marketing team in check and enables you continually monitor and evaluate your marketing efforts.

I've created a 6 day intensive annual marketing plan course that can help you in developing your own marketing plan. In this course we will revisit your marketing goals and determine what it is that you hope to achieve in the upcoming year with your marketing efforts. We will then chart the course on how you can achieve those goals and objectives. I have found that many people avoid this process because they don't know where to begin the process. The good news is that's what this course is for.

Over the next six days I will walk you through the steps of creating a solid marketing plan. Sign up and let's get started in developing your annual marketing plan for 2010 today.

In October of this year, the FTC released guidelines for advertisers on how to keep their endorsement and testimonial ads in line with the FTC Act. This has raised much controversy; espcially in the realm of bloggers.

Under the new guidelines, it is the job of bloggers to disclose their connection with an advertiser and whether they are being paid to endorse a product. Questions have been raised since the release of the guidelines on whether this takes away from the credibility of a blogger's product recommendation and possibly even diminish the value of blog marketing.

The new guidelines specifically address advertisements that feature a consumer and convey their experience with a product or service as typical, when that is not the case, will be required to clearly disclose the results that consumers can generally expect. This is different than the 1980s version, which allowed advertisers to describe unusual results in a testimonial, as long as they included a disclaimer such as "results not typical."  The revised version no longer allows this disclaimer to be sufficient.

Whose Responsibility Is It to Disclose?

The obligation to disclose the connection between a blogger and an advertiser rests "primarily" on the blogger, but is also shared by the advertiser.

The determination of whether a blog post is deemed an "endorsement" depends on a variety of factors. This means that each will be determined on a case-by-case analysis, leaving both the advertiser and the blogger subject to liability for misleading or unsubstantiated representations made in the course of the blogger endorsement.  A blogger is now also liable if they fail to clearly disclose that they are being paid for their endorsement or review.

Your Turn: What are your thoughts regarding these new guidelines?  Will it make bloggers more credible or will it hurt advertisers when it comes to the disclosure?  What will this do to word of mouth marketing?