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This was sent to www.pollenizer.com, a company I just got to know.  It’s what every job application aspires to be when it grows up.

Gary Vaynerchuk may be annoying to the point where you want to tell him to just shut up.

But he’s also a guy who not only knows a Syrah from a Merlot or a [insert wine of choice], but also how the world is turning in terms of marketing, brands, viral, word of mouth and [insert web 2.0 buzzword of choice]. 

Listen to his annoyingly hyperactive analogy between web 2.0 and giving a presentation. Clever, clever.

I want to share a quote from a book by Dan Kennedy, with you.

“… the vast majority’s interest in improving, but only if doing so requires no change, discomfort, or initiative. That’s why, in every field, a few out-earn the huge ‘mediocre majority’ by giant margins.”

Blunt, and true.

I’ve always (since the dawn of time, or at least since 2004) been advocating the end of the concept of an online marketing budget for any online business where you can measure results.

The concept of a budget is faulty and precisely opposite to the approach you should take.

Scenario A - you spend a dollar on AdWords, and get 1.20 back.
Q: What should you do? 
A: BUY AS MANY CLICKS AS YOU CAN

Scenario B - you spend a dollar on AdWords, and get 0.80 back.
Q: What should you do? 
A: STOP BUYING

Notice how the concept of budget doesn’t really fit in?

In fact, it’s a pure cash-flow excercise.

If you want to make the lines a little fuzzier, go ahead and apply factors such as inventory management and alternative channels. Sure, you’ll need to time your marketing right if you’re selling momentarily finite inventory like, say, hotel rooms. And, you’ll have to consider if you can attract a specific customer or customer group even less expensively in another channel, etc, etc.

But the general idea is still - if it works, do as much of it as possible. If it doesn’t work, stop doing it. 

If that’s not a blinding flash of the obvious, I do not know what is - and still, there are online marketing budgets.

Just finished listening to the audiobook version of Tribes by Seth Godin.

I recommend it to all future tribe leaders.

Let’s face it - Testing scares stakeholders. After all, testing creates accountability. It removes a lot of padding that you can typically rely on in marketing:

“I didn’t know”, “how could we have known”, “no one could have guessed”

Well, perhaps no one could have guessed, but almost everyone could have tested, if they had thought about it, or knew how ….or dared.

So, we take this piece of human nature into account, and deal with it. 

The most typical exampel of all is most likely the company website.

After all, what does your Google Analytics report tell you about what’s right or wrong? Why should you listen to anyone telling you that typically menus should go on the left, and images go on the right? God forbid you should do an eytracking heatmap analysis - to find out that your colorful logo does in fact actually attract the eye more than the 10p black text next to it.

No, really? Fascinating! Now what?

Compare the above happy, safe environment where nothing is really wrong and nothing is really right, to:

Creating version A and version B of your site, then watch a random population of new visitors experience these, each visitor most likely oblivious to the existance of the other version. 

Now we find that version B does in fact ceteris paribus generate twice as much revenue as version A.

Let’s say you are the designer/champion of version A. This isn’t a nice, padded environment you are facing. It’s a situation where you are proven brutally wrong.

But, it’s also a situation where we’ve just found out that version B might earn your company enough money to give you a raise next year, and you’ve just been part of something hugely valuable that will help you create much better things next time.

Saying that your version stinks is also perhaps not true, perhaps it was a great result - only B was even better. Perhaps the foundation of your version A, was crucial to coming up with  B. Perhaps you shouldn’t be burned at the stake after all?

Ideally, of course, you were the one ushering in this process in the company, so you worked on both versions, always communicating openly to your colleagues that no one can really tell what’s best before it’s tested.

Which is, of course, the truth.

I think by now it’s safe to assume that the rumours about Google buying Expedia, were indeed not true.

Big surprise. Not.

Drive & stay vacations are grossly overlooked within the travel industry. 

It can’t be because the industry is too small or that there’s no money in it (because it’s huge and still has decent margins left even for aggregators) . It can’t be because there are no technological challenges or potential for building neat sites (it’s probably right up there with the average fly&stay holiday in terms of booking complexity and online proliferation).

No, my $0.02 is the reason drive&stay keeps flying below radar is the growth vector doesn’t look like that of an OTA, where you can just aggregate commoditized stuff and grab traffic from everywhere. This is in stark contrast to the drive&stay market, where inventory is completely fragmented, and aggregators need to go out and get inventory face to face with camp-sites, vacation facilities, mom-n-pop type operations.

Now the key aggregators already hoarding prime inventory like fierce dragons are mostly kind of old-school, but not stupid, so they’re adapting step by step to online operations, a ballpark estimate is about 50-50 online/call-center.

More importantly, my guess is the drive & stay market is going to be hit like everything else by the economic down-turn, but will gain market share on the shrinking market, as self-drive holidays can be easily adjusted to fit budget, and although gas for the car might be more expensive, cost of flying is being hit even harder.

A blog entry by Seth Godin about the inherently non-commercial nature of the Internet (here) points to some interesting characteristics that marketers need to consider.

But I think Godin oversimplifies things (gasp!). Perhaps he knows this and doesn’t care, which is quite alright, it’s still a very valid point he is making about why and how the Net has become what it is today, and what we expect from it.

However, Mr. Godin is comparing the Internet to a newspaper or a TV-station, and that just doesn’t make sense. I think it’s more valid to compare the Internet to the invention of the Printing Press, Radio or TV broadcasting. There are non-commercial radio stations, non-profit magazines and publications with no advertising in it. I don’t even have to mention books - when was the last time you bought a novel with ads in it? Get the point?

In fact, with giant webshops like Amazon, wonderfully fragmented marketplaces like eBay and über-commercial Swiss Army Knives of shopping like price comparison sites, there are definetly Internet real-estate that’s every bit as commercial as anything you can point your finger at offline. 

We really only have to look at the success of AdWords, to realize that it’s not even about targeting User A (would never buy a thing) or User B (Shopoholic), instead it’s about Momentary Mindsets. 

Yesterday User A might have been a Concerned Citizen researching additives in baby food;

Today User A has calmed down and morphed into User B - dead set on finding a home-delivery subscription service for baby food.

Yesterday no ad in the world would have converted, today, any half decent offer has a good chance.

Today is the day User A clicks on those AdWords ads from somerandombabyfoodname.com.

We all know that anything (really *anything*) posted online has the chance or risk of spreading like wildfire, once it gains momentum.

Some companies like ComCast and Southwest Airlines are now actively monitoring and responding to posts about them in blogs and sites like Twitter and YouTube. It sounds like thinking outside the box and embracing the brave new world, but it’s really something that should be included, if not given top priority in any business intelligence setup.

Thousands of companies are paying agencies to learn about what’s written about them in print, while simultaneously turning a blind eye to a mass media where things can get ugly really fast. That just doesn’t make sense.

My prediction - the rise of a new breed of social network consultants managing company-consumer relations in social networks.