Companies are changing the way that they interact with consumers by shifting marketing strategies from pushing out to pulling in. These strategies, called "Inbound Marketing," are characterized by techniques that use the Internet and media to determine what products and services best meet consumers’ needs.

"Inbound marketers offer useful information, tools and resources to attract these people to their site," while they use the web to develop relationships with customers. These inbound marketing tools include blogging, content publishing, search engine optimization, social media and social networks.

Hubspot’s 2010 State of Inbound Marketing, released February 16th, determined these key findings:

Inbound marketing results in far lower cost-per-sales than outbound channels.

When marketing budget majority goes to inbound marketing, responses showed a sixty percent lower cost-per-sales than those who spent more on outbound marketing. Businesses are shifting their budget allocations in respect to this, so that 37 percent is now dedicated to inbound marketing, and only thirty percent is dedicated to outbound marketing efforts. Hubspot expects the difference to increase over time.

Blogs are more important to businesses than other social media categories.

That cost-per-lead effectiveness showed 55 percent of company blogs to be less expensive in 2009. 48 percent of organic and natural search engine optimization rated below average cost-per-lead, while only 32 percent of paid search or AdWords performed similarly.

More companies that use inbound marketing have acquired customers from these channels.

From between 41 and 46 percent of companies that used social media marketing channels had acquired a customer this way. For business-to-business firms, LinkedIn performed higher than any other site - 45 percent, with the company blog, Twitter and Facebook in declining order. For business-to-consumer companies, Facebook performed best (68 percent), followed by the company blog (57%), then Twitter (51%), and last by quite a bit, LinkedIn (26%).

Image via CrunchBase

The abundance of location features in social networks, such as FourSquare, Brightkite and more recently Twitter and Google, raise the problem of privacy. Many experts think that these privacy issues will disappear as the localization trend becomes more and more common. Defenders of localization features claim that they don’t raise any privacy problems as users themselves made the choice to participate and share private data with their friends.

This is where Google may be crossing the line, as it chose an “opt-out” solution rather than an “opt-in” solution. Meaning that users are automatically enrolled without being asked and have to “opt-out” if they don’t want to participate.

Indeed, when enrolling in the location-aware mobile app Google Latitude, all of your Google contacts will receive notifications about where you are even though they didn’t sign in to get them. Google sends these alerts automatically if one of your contacts opts in for the service launched early February 2010. As Google explains on its website:

“Alerts are sent to both nearby friends if they are sharing their location with each other, even if only one of them has enabled alerts.”

To prevent being harassed every minute by these kinds of notifications, Google will notify you only when your friends are in “unusual places.” In Google’s words: “Location Alerts are only sent when your friend is at an unusual place during a given time of the week based on their location history, filtering out routine locations such as a daily commute.”

Google Latitude is so intrusive that if you refuse to receive this kind of notification you’ll have no choice but to opt-out of these emails by visiting its website.

The intrusiveness of Google is even more worrying when remembering last week’s Google Buzz, again an “opt-out” solution in which people saw themselves following friends and being followed without being asked. Consequently they were sharing private information with people they didn’t want to.

These new and intrusive products don’t seem to match Google’s corporate motto of “don’t be evil.” On the contrary it makes the giant of the Internet industry even more disturbing…

While the blogosphere lit up this weekend in response to Paul Carr’s questioning of citizen journalism and whether social networks makes people more egotistical (is it just me, or are more and more high-profile tech journalists getting burnt out on covering, if not using, social networking?), another potential controversy was missed.

Moore’s Law is the true cause of the recession, Quentin Hardy writes in Forbes.

Out a list of all possible contenders, the real culprit is a superconductor paradigm? Why?

To begin: with the continual fall in computing prices, Wall Street practices became more complex.

“Complexity itself became the grail, and the street hired the best statisticians and physicists it could find to set forth even more complex calculations,” Hardy writes.

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We attended the Social Web Camp at Sun Microsystems’ beautiful campus in Santa Clara yesterday.

Like any good barcamp, questions were raised and theory raged. Many of the questions were fascinating, representing a lot of the problems developers and users have today, and giving a glimpse of what future solutions might be.

Here are the most interesting questions explored at the event:

Who ultimately owns your online presence, you or the social network?

Our identities are fragmented, our likes and tastes are fragmented: how do we manage these tastes when communicating across social networks?

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The best source of traffic is Facebook.

The social networking site’s users are the most loyal referred visitors, according to an analysis of 33 million September internet users by the ad network Chitika.

More than twenty percent of Facebook users loyal are loyal visitors. For the purpose of the study, users were considered loyal if they visited a referred site four or more times per week.

Digg and Yahoo! were second to Facebook, with 16 percent of each site’s users considered loyal.

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For the last six or so months I’ve been running on the assumption that social networks were replacing email.

Like most every opinion I have, this belief turned out to be completely unfounded and untrue.

Researchers at Nielsen believed the same thing and created a study to test this hypothesis. And their early findings show that the opposite is true:the more people use social media, the more time they spend on email, too.

The email use of high and medium social media consumers has jumped between April 2008 and 2009. In fact, the email use of high social media consumers has more than doubled in that time, increasing more than 100 minutes a month to just under 190 minutes in April 2009.

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The amount of times spent of social networks has tripled in the last year, according to Nielsen (PDF).

A year ago, users spent 6 percent of their online time on social networks, but as of August 2009, time spent on social networks now represents 17 percent of total internet use.

“This growth suggests a wholesale change in the way the Internet is used,” said Nielsen’s Jon Gibs.

“While video and text content remain central to the Web experience – the desire of online consumers to connect, communicate and share is increasingly driving the medium’s growth,” Gibs said.

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A few years back, at an old job in a state far, far away, one of my fellow co-workers was fired because of a post she made on MySpace.

Wherein she threatened to put laxative in our coffee.

A long HR battle ensued, the main point of contention being whether what she had MySpaced (didn’t it look like I just wrote in Sanskrit there?) was technically in the public or private realm.

A few years later, we all know the answer to that question. Every week there’s a new Facebook/Twitter firing or faux pas, the latest that I know of being when a California Pizza Kitchen employee criticized his company’s uniform switch.

With human resources departments increasingly having to deal with social-network-related problems, there still isn’t any consensus on how to treat social-networking job infractions.

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(Update: December 10, 2009: Stribe won top honors at this week’s Le Web in Paris)

It all started with sports.

After running a semi-marathon a few years ago, Kamel Zeroual wanted to keep in touch with the community that had been created at the event. But there was nothing online, not even a Facebook page.

“We said ‘OK, it’s a pity. We shared interests, spirit,’” Zeroual says of the lack of tools to reconnect the community that had participated in the race.

So Zeroual created those tools. The result, Stribe, is the first French startup to be named finalist at TechCrunch50.

“Getting selected for TechCrunch50 is like graduating from school,” CEO Zeroual says.

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LearnVest is a personal finance site designed primarily for women. Users can customize what aspects of their personal finances are most important to them, from mortgages to grad school payments to credit scores.

LearnVest offers a step-by-step financial walkthrough, giving expert advice for financial concerns like dealing with debt and it promises to cover every financial event that one can come across. Nice design. Game dynamics were criticized by VCs.

lissn, which was introduced with the promise to “make Robert Scoble’s head explode,” connects users with real-time conversations. IM-ing with rich metadata? Conversation-based advertising. Very hashtaggy.

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