[Posted by Dave Frankland]

Traditional direct marketing has faced a range of hurdles over the last several years from Do Not Call lists, budgets shifting to online, spam complaints, etc. Where’s the latest challenge coming from? It appears to be the green movement. Advocacy groups and consumers are shining the light on the practices of direct mailers and catalogers – and their impact on the environment.  Some states are proposing Do Not Mail lists, organizations like the DMA, CatalogChoice, and GreenDimes allow consumers to register to cut back on the catalogs they receive, while the whole subject of Greenness gets brighter.

[Posted by Christine Spivey Overby]

Whenever the economy takes a down turn, marketers will inevitably ask the question, "How would a recession impact my budget?" This worry is especially true for more experimental forms of marketing, such as certain forms of interactive marketing and social media.

At Forrester in recent weeks, we on the Interactive Marketing team have asked this question too -- of our analysts and a handful of interactive marketers. The results of this analysis -- and our tips for how interactive marketers can protect their budgets and survive (even thrive) in a downturn -- are in a new piece "Strategies For Interactive Marketing In A Recession."

Three reasons:

1) Google gets the best and the brightest from Yahoo. Why? Compensation. Microsoft, in a titanic mistake, eliminated stock options as an employee incentive early in the decade, replacing them with  much less lucrative and leveraged restricted stock. If you're a hot programmer at Yahoo, you'll get options at Google -- not at Microsoft. Aside from compensation, Google's culture, speed, lack of bureaucracy, location, lack of legacy will be big attractors of talent.

2) The confusion factor. Microsoft has never acquired or absorbed anything as large as Yahoo -- unlike Cisco it has no culture or processes around large-scale integration. Microsoft's tight programming ethic will be naturally suspicious of Yahoo and its culture of media and advertising. When the inevitable integration plans are drafted, MSN and the search gurus at Microsoft will defend turf. In a market defined by a quick pace, Microsoft will take years to get this integration right.

Earlier this week, Sun Microsystems announced that its Project Blackbox was now a commercially shipping product. I have to confess that when they first told me about this effort I saw it as a nice showcase innovation — something they could use to demonstrate how densely racks could be configured and how energy efficient their products were. They could drive it from city to city for in-person demonstrations. Nice marketing idea. But I didn’t see the practicality to real enterprise data centers. Who’d be willing to buy a container and park it outside their data center? Yeah, that’s secure.

A colleague, Ray Wang, has loads of fascinating statistics in his recent data overview, "The State Of Enterprise Software Adoption: 2007 To 2008." A staggering number of companies have developed and maintain custom applications.

Ray's piece is written for the market researcher, but like all good research, it has much broader implications. Perhaps you won't be surprised when I say, "Including product managers!"

The statistic says that a lot of demand exists that technology vendors are not meeting. Custom development is a last resort--and I should know, since I've done it myself.

Twice in my career, I've pushed to create custom requirements management (RM) applications. In the last case, I wrote it myself in PHP and MySQL. (Never fear, it's a laughably rudimentary application, functionality-wise, so the friend and colleague who inherited it wasn't left with an unmaintainable mess.)