Q&As

Search engine and Internet portal Yahoo! will swap java for eyeballs this Friday.

Blyth Inc., a vendor of candles, seasonal decorations and home d

The Internet is overflowing with poorly executed email marketing newsletters. Here’s advice on how to create a newsy marketing communication that people continue to open and actually read. We’ve all gotten them. Some of us, to our vexation and bewilderment, have produced them: email marketing newsletters that fail to keep recipients opening and clicking over time.

In 1927’s “The Jazz Singer,” Al Jolson addressed movie audiences and uttered the famous line “Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” While the line was introducing a musical number in the film, it has been linked with the first full-length Hollywood “talkie” – a movie with a spoken audio soundtrack. It’s a line that could also be applied to online content delivery.

“You never call, you never write.” Who wants to have their customers say that? Certainly not software marketer PTC, which is seeing an uptick in revenue and customer interaction thanks to an e-newsletter program for its resellers created by IMN.

Nothing in the online advertising space has attracted more attention recently than the phenomenon of social networking. And judging by the audience numbers for these online communities, nothing probably could. (Well, if Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes began renting out ad space on baby Suri’s Pampers, perhaps.)

Frito-Lay is putting at least some of its Super Bowl advertising in consumers’ hands this year.

Ford is ditching the typical luck-of-the-draw sweepstakes mold by challenging nine consumers to a NASCAR experience that places them behind the wheels of race-prepped Ford vehicles to race around a speedway to win NASCAR-related prizes.

Taco Bell has dubbed a Florida man as its El Presidente, giving one consumer $93,000 in sweepstakes winnings and a chance to tour its company headquarters.

I think most business-to-business marketers should aim for “get it out” and “good enough” rather than aim for perfection when it comes to marketing to drive leads and sales.