How many email marketing messages do you receive every day? You probably don’t even think about it as you hit the delete button. Every day, I delete more marketing messages than I can count, and most of them don’t hold my attention for longer than it takes me to remove them from my inbox.

The messages I’m most likely delete are the canned form emails — messages that have clearly been sent to every single person on the marketer’s list with no discernible difference.

When the message is personalized, I’m more likely to take notice. I’m not just talking about adding my name to the subject line or addressing the email to me personally (though that should be the very least you do). I’m talking about personalized marketing messages that address my needs directly.

Case in point: I order heartworm prevention medication for my dog, Howie, through 1-800-PetMeds every 6 months. Their successful use of email marketing is one of the reasons I continue to refill his prescription through them.

Every 6 months, I receive an email reminding me that it’s time to order Howie’s medication. The email message isn’t just a reminder, though. It’s a refill link. The details for my completed order are listed, including my subtotal, shipping address, and last four digits of my credit card. All I have to do is click the link, and my refill order is placed. Click through to enlarge the image:

The email isn’t just a reminder that 1-800-PetMeds wants me to order from them — it’s a useful reminder that it’s time for me to reorder for my dog, Howie. Because it’s personalized and useful to me, I’m less likely to delete and more likely to take action.

They don’t stop there, though. Periodically, I receive messages that offer solutions to common health problems for pets. The most recent asked in the subject line, “Does Howie have bad breath? If so, it could mean poor health.” Thankfully, that’s not a big problem for me, but seeing my dog’s name in the subject line linked to possible health problems sure gets my attention.

Bottom line: don’t just use email marketing to remind your customers that you exist. Use it to offer your products or services to solve their problems. Be creative with personalization, and you’ll see more conversions and fewer deleted email messages.

When President Obama took office on January 20, he ushered in a new era in the White House — a new media era including an updated interactive website and the first ever White House blog.

Despite the fact that the President’s campaign staff was smart with social media throughout the campaign, I was still a little skeptical about how the new administration would utilize social media methods — particularly the blog. Would it end up being a glorified PR page with nothing but press releases and no real social engagement?

Today they proved me wrong with the nation’s first ever official White House liveblog of President Obama’s town hall meeting in Ft. Myers, FL. The up-to-the-minute updates included quotes from the speech, snippets of conversation between the President and the crowd, and links to other pertinent information.

The White House liveblog has taken ordinary PR one step further to real interaction and engagement. Citizens who couldn’t be at the townhall meeting could experience official live updates directly from the administration.

I’d still rather get my news from a trusted, unbiased news source (The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal were also liveblogging the events yesterday and today as well as a countless other independent political and news bloggers), but it’s still nice to see the administration utilizing social media to its full potential to interact with the American public.

Last month, TechCrunch reported that Facebook has grown to double the size of MySpace, which was once the top social media site in terms of traffic, growth, and users. Now according to Compete, Twitter is rising fast.

In the past year, Twitter has jumped from the #22 spot in visits to #3. It’s still light years behind Facebook and MySpace, though. Facebook receives an astonishing 1,191,373,339 visits per month and MySpace receives 810,153,536, which puts Twitter at a distant third with only 54,218,731 monthly visits. But Twitter is showing amazing potential for growth. It continues to grow exponentially as MySpace’s numbers (both in visits and time on site) are declining. This is even more amazing considering the fact that Twitter has no business model and no revenue. Yet.

It will be interesting to see where Twitter goes next, and what social media sites will skyrocket in the coming year.

A recent study by the Google User Experience Research team (featured here at WebProNews) determined that searches have become so routine that users tend to make decisions about where to look and what to click unconsciously. But Google is clever. They’re using eye-tracking technology to gather valuable information about how users scan search results:

“Based on eye-tracking studies, we know that people tend to scan the search results in order. They start from the first result and continue down the list until they find a result they consider helpful and click it — or until they decide to refine their query. The heatmap below shows the activity of 34 usability study participants scanning a typical Google results page. The darker the pattern, the more time they spent looking at that part of the page. This pattern suggests that the order in which Google returned the results was successful; most users found what they were looking for among the first two results and they never needed to go further down the page.”

According to Google, adding images to a search results page does not affect the order in which users view results. Even if images appear below text links, users’ eyes are drawn to the top results first.

These results aren’t surprising. They prove what any SEO-savvy marketer already knows — one of the most effective ways of getting noticed on the Web is appearing in the top organic results for your strongest keywords. What does surprise me is how quickly users lose interest in a results page — many users don’t even look beyond the second result.

If you’re not at the top or close to it, now might be the time to revamp your search engine optimization strategy to make sure you’re capitalizing on the power of organic search.

The Internet can be a very scary place. If you’re new to the concept of social media marketing, it’s even scarier. Facebook, Twitter, Digg, blogs … it seems that the Internet has ushered in a completely new era in marketing.

The truth is, these marketing methods have been around for decades. Social media marketers are simply recycling traditional marketing ideas and packaging them in a shiny new box. The ideas aren’t new. Like everything else, they’re just easier to execute and measure using Web tools.

Let’s start with blogs. The platform may have changed, but the idea of distributing knowledge and news has been around for centuries. From an information perspective, blogging is no different from a newspaper. From a marketing standpoint, it’s the same concept as a newsletter. The only difference is it’s much easier and faster to distribute information and get feedback online. With newspapers and newsletters, a letter to the editor or a phone call was the fastest way to interact with the author. Now it’s as easy as adding a comment or sending a quick email in response.

Social networking sites like Facebook started out a lot like alumni associations — a way to keep in touch with old classmates. Registering with Facebook makes it easy for old friends, colleagues, and associates to connect with you — like adding your name and current contact information to an alumni directory.

Now with the addition of Facebook marketing tools and networking sites like LinkedIn, they’ve become more like professional networking associations or trade organizations. When you add your company page, it’s like adding your business to a directory. Anyone looking for your services can easily look you up, find out the best way to reach you, learn a little bit about what you do, and seek references.

Social bookmarking sites (Digg, Mixx, StumbleUpon) are no different from traditional word-of-mouth advertising. For decades, businesses counted on customers spreading news for free. The Web has just made it a whole lot faster and easier to spread the word to a lot more people at once.

And Twitter, perhaps the most innovative thing to come out of social media marketing yet. It may seem like a strange concept at first, but Twitter has been compared to a crowded cocktail party. If you build your followers list strategically, it becomes a lot like an industry networking event. Everyone is mingling, sharing ideas, and you can’t make it back to the bar for another drink without bumping into someone new.

Social media marketing and traditional marketing are most alike when it comes to process. You wouldn’t spend thousands of dollars on a print ad campaign without coming up with a game plan, so don’t walk blindly into a social media marketing campaign, either.

Just like traditional marketing, the first step is strategic planning. Start there, and the rest is easy.

You probably use Google Analytics or another search tracking tool on your website (and if you don’t, you should). What makes these applications so powerful for SEO is their ability to show exactly how potential customers are finding your site — especially when it comes to keywords.

If you regularly monitor your analytics, you’re able to see exactly what keywords users are typing into search engines to find your website. This information is extremely useful from an SEO perspective, because it tells you whether you’re optimizing for the right keywords. It also helps measure the success of an optimization by showing whether the keywords you’ve used to optimize your site are actually drawing in traffic.

Google recently began testing a new search interface powered by AJAX. What you need to know is that this could wreak havoc on the ability to track keyword searches with an analytics tracking tool.

You already may have started noticing referral traffic from “Google.com.” This is caused by the way the AJAX interface handles searches. In the past, the URL in your navigation bar after a search looked like this:

Analytics tools are able to fish the keywords out of that search to show you what keywords your visitors are searching for in order to find your site.

If your search is being affected by the AJAX testing, your URL after searching will look like this:

The difference is in the “#” symbol after the word “search.” It’s called a hashtag, and analytics tools are unable to read search terms after the hashtag. Instead of specifying which keywords were used in the search, they list the referral from “Google.com,” which means you lose valuable data about the keywords.

According to a statement from Google, this is only a test, and they “have no intention to disrupt referrer tracking.” This isn’t a permanent switch — yet. However, if you regularly monitor your site’s analytics and keywords, your referrer tracking may already be disrupted by these tests.

It pays to market in a down economy, and Super Bowl advertisers proved this year that there’s no better time to plug your brand than a recession. According to USAToday, 28 advertisers spent a record $206 million on Super Bowl spots that cost a whopping $100,000 a second this year ($3 million for a 30-second spot). For their money, they reached nearly 100 million views during yesterday’s game.

Advertisers were mindful of the audience’s money woes, though. In addition to the typical light-hearted comedy ads, many of this year’s commercials featured an uplifting message.

If you missed any (or all) of this year’s Super Bowl ads, there’s a complete list of Super Bowl 2009 commercials posted at AdAge. If you’re just interested in the best of the best (and worst of the worst), Time magazine compiled a list of highlights and lowlights for this Super Bowl advertising season.

My favorite ad this year? Pepsi’s “Refresh Anthem” with an uplifting montage of cultural images spanning several generations: