An ounce of practice

Today I spent a couple of hours exploring marketing as it is shaped by the existence of the Internet and infotech. In fact, I wanted to try to run a campaign myself by configuring it on Google Adwords and to see what effort this entails for a business owner. That's one way of understanding the practical implications of web marketing, which is key for me to deliver the best possible service to my customers. "An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching" as Gandhi used to say...

As part of that experiment, I came across a great series of posts on Guerilla Consulting. The author, Andrea Harris, discusses her personal experience working on one of her customers' web marketing. She gives her views about the issue of search engine optimisation, visibility and available tools to support web marketing work. She very rightly points out the issues of metrics, which were already a hot topic for traditional web marketing and are becoming even more intense with newer buzz and word-of-mouth marketing; something I discovered with amazement during my work for BuzzParadise in summertime. In fact, BuzzParadise have developed tools allowing them to gather information about the actual impact of a campaign and although they remain perfectible I was positively impressed with their commitment to actually measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. On the other hand, with customers like Nokia, Time-Warner or Procter & Gamble can they afford not to measure?