1. Marketing firms are trading in some of their longer-term client relationships for more project-based contracting.

Atlanta Business Chronicle article PR, marketing firms offering low-cost services discusses how firms are adapting by "offering new abbreviated and lower-cost services to help keep themselves and their clients afloat" in a time of tightened budgets.

2. People are turning to online & social media marketing as they realize it's measurable, targetable, and can deliver serious ROI when executed well.

Watch Gary Vaynerchuk's 5 minute video You Down with ROI?...to hear about how "traditional media advertising is incredibly expensive and doesn’t provide nearly the rate of return you can derive from intelligent web-based marketing campaigns in 2008 and beyond." (I don't think Gary curses in this one, but be forewarned).

This site is a simple gaming application that gives rice to the hungry in third world countries through donations. Donations are made per click, and the 'game' is to match a word with its synonym by clicking on the correct answer. The widget allows users to play a variety of subjects, including English, foreign language, math, chemistry, and geography.

According to the site, FreeRice has two goals:

1. Provide education to everyone for free.
2. Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.

FreeRice.com is a brilliant example of social marketing. It reaches out through social media]]>

It seems that the idea of one more inbox-like application to maintain is a frightening thought to a business person these days - as well as the thought of spending time on an activity for which 'ROI' can be difficult to conceptualize.  This particularly holds true for someone who has never tried using social media for business-gain.    

For those who are curious about the possible value lurking somewhere out in the Twitterverse, here are some thoughts on ways you can utilize Twitter]]>

The below commercial is promoting solar energy in an entertaining, thought-provoking way, using a ‘might as well use it, as its literally falling from the sky!' creative strategy that opens the mind of the viewer to the opportunity of capturing this highly available energy. 

A strange woman paced in front our home this week and I could hear my husband starting a conversation with her. It turns out she had grown up in our almost-100-year-old home. With delight we invited her in and she roamed the house, pointing to where the old kitchen sink used to be and showing us where she played marbles in the upstairs hallway.

Her appearance was oddly interesting as she ushered us through an era of time that also engaged in war, fuel shortages, genocide and global unrest. This small, energetic woman talked of the kitchen packed with neighbors and family cooking meals together; of her grandparent’s living in the room off the dining area and her secret messages to the boy next door from her upstairs bedroom.

Her sudden appearance and her misty-eyed walk through our house was a reminder of the cyclical nature of history and the unrelenting insistence of our own humanity. Despite our panic, our worry and our sleepless nights, our memories choose to remain with the simple, basic fabric of what makes life livable.

No doubt this strange woman, bent and shrunk with age had weathered the uproar of her own life, buffeted about like a leaf in a gale and summarily crushed with little thought by powers greater than she. And yet she survived like we all eventually do, to unremarkably find ourselves right back where we began.