As spring approaches, we are entering high planning season for our upcoming Forrester Marketing Forum. This is my third year designing the event content, and my co-host Carl Doty and I are working with the keynotes on their speeches. Things are shaping up nicely!

We just caught up with Pam Kaufman, CMO of Nickelodeon, and her team. Nickelodeon (producer of my son's favorite SpongeBob SquarePants) is undergoing a big effort to link their family of brands to the parent Nickelodeon brand. Forrester's event will be the first time that they've told their story externally. Pam has great passion and enthusiasm for her brand and this effort - I can't wait to hear more . . .

If you have a specific question that you'd like to ask Pam during the Q&A, then feel free to comment here or send me an email (coverby@forrester.com).

We hope to see you at the forum. Our Early Bird rate expired March 12, but if you call our Events Team at 617.613.5905 with discount code MFXBLG, and they’ll extend the $200 discount for you.

Today at SES in New York, Microsoft announced some further refinements to its Bing search engine.  MS will flight the following changes to users over the next several weeks:

• Top rail navigation will go tabular – in response to positive use of the category navigation along the left hand side of Bing, MS is also going to adjust the top rail of the search results to include tabs that will allow for drill down into categories of content related to the user’s search.  Left rail and top rail categories will vary according to the search.  See below for an example:

I've recently found myself in interesting discussions--one might call some of them debates--about ROI and Social Media.  In recent weeks, Social Media ROI was the agenda for meetings with several clients, the focus of a panel on which I participated at Digiday Social, and a lively topic of discussion at a dinner of marketing leaders in town for the OMMA Global event.  And today I read an article about Wal-Mart that got me to thinking about the dangers of too narrowly defining ROI.

It's interesting to hear the wide range of attitudes toward social media ROI.  Some companies measure quite a bit about their social media activities but do not evaluate ROI in its most literal definition:  The financial return generated by a specific monetary investment.  Others go through a great deal of effort to measure ROI, creating complex models to calculate an approximation of financial return. 

Some in the direct marketing space are beginning to value their social media efforts much as they do their PPC campaigns--assessing the cost of participation compared to the clicks, conversions and sales generated from trackable links seeded into tweets and Facebook posts.  This sort of measurement is essential and inevitable for companies that sell direct to consumers, but it's important companies not become overly narrow and begin to assess social media as just another click-generating channel. 

My colleague Julie Ask just published a piece on the reality of mobile coupons in response to questions like “do consumers use mobile coupons?” “should we be developing a mobile coupon offering?” and “what technologies should I adopt to support mobile couponing efforts?” – questions that she and I get asked with some frequency.

I was involved in some of the initial structuring of this report and then also involved in the editing phase.  And I would love to recommend it to interactive marketers. Here are the most important takeaways:

• Consumers like the promise of mobile coupons, but there is not yet mass adoption.  Mobile coupons promise to be a convenient way to aggregate customized discounts all in a single place (your mobile phone) that is much easier for storage than say an envelope of clipped paper coupons.
• Mobile coupons appeal to advertisers too, but technology hurdles prevent mass utilization.  Advertisers love the idea of being able to offer targeted promotions that are cheaper to deliver and redeem than traditional coupons.  But the reality is that scaling redemption technologies and processes at check out is pricey for the limited coupon-using audience today.
• Advertisers should start small mobile coupon trials now.  Mobile coupons don’t need to be your top marketing priority for 2010 (that honor goes to paid search, display ad, advanced email and social media) but we do recommend now as a good time to start a trial.  Vendors like cellfire can outsource the management and distribution of mobile coupons and offer flexible terms in an effort to sign up new advertisers.