Call it a quagmire, if you must, but our recent economic malaise and the fast pace of technological development has left all interested parties - agencies, CMOs, publishers, regulators, consumers and investors alike - searching for true north.

Joining Google in 2006, Erin Schaeffer was one of the founders of Google's TV Ads platform, working on finance, marketing, and sales for the platform's alpha and beta launches. She now heads up online video content monetization and brand advertising sales for Google's TV platform. "Erin is a great manager, strategic thinker, and sales leader. Her scope of work has continuously expanded since we began working together three years ago and she is a real rising star," said Mike Steib, her boss and director of emerging platforms at Google. Prior to joining Google, Erin worked in Strategic Planning at Gap …

On the heels of last year's econapocalypse we released our previous survival guide. And, well, here's the thing: We can't help thinking it came up a little short. Maybe it had been too much. Like Tom Waits' William the Pleaser, we sold opium and fireworks in that issue. And as a result, things just got worse.

Sometimes a number can be both frightening and liberating. Like this one from Don Schultz, a professor of integrated marketing communications at Northwestern: Only 4 to 5 percent of customers account for the preponderance of a consumer product's sales. Does that make the other 95 percent of a marketer's customers chopped liver? Maybe a little bit. Because not only does that 4 to 5 percent comprise most of your sales and your profits, the rest of your customers often cost you money to acquire.

You can't rest on your laurels when it comes to sports video game marketing," says 72andsunny creative director Glenn Cole, whose agency, in collaboration with the sports branding firm Zambezi, launched an ambitious full-court marketing press this past September to promote the October release of NBA 2K10.

Coming out of anthropology, I have always been interested in social and cultural interaction, identity and how we display ourselves in a public venue. Because brands are focusing more and more on social media as a significant point of marketing, it becomes increasingly important to understand the nuances of who is actually speaking and being spoken to in a virtual environment. How do self-presentation strategies impact who we choose to be in a social media space?

I'll be up front: I'm not here to make a case for search expansion into new markets. I'm going to assume that your company, or your brand, has a grasp on that already. However, what I am going to do is highlight certain aspects that I've learned from managing campaigns in multiple countries.

When The Passion of the Christ was first pitched, many Hollywood executives thought it was crazy. So crazy in fact that big budget studios, in the end, didn't foot the entire bill. And how it cost them. When the final tally was told, the box office receipts cleared $600 million, making independent investors extremely wealthy.

In a tight market, sem pros need more of an edge than ever to differentiate their brands and deliver results. Therefore, they bid high on keywords to grab as much demand as possible. But assuming this generates traffic, will visitors find cookie-cutter pages, a hit-and-miss scenario in terms of relevance? Or will they find personalized pages, providing measurable conversion lift?

Most of us can remember when as children we would ask our parents' permission to do something. And most of us - at least once or twice - probably threw in the old argument, "Well, my friend's mom is letting him do it." Today's social media marketing efforts may sound very familiar.