Ah, rumors – they’re often difficult to report, never mind analyze.  Yet here you are: Gregory Coleman, Yahoo’s executive vice president of global sales, may be replaced by Hilary Schneider.  And this personnel move may be an example of favoritism among executives, or it could demonstrate how desperate Yahoo is to reverse a downward slide.

Mobile phone sales in the U.S. reached 33 million units in the second quarter of 2007, according to the NPD Group.

For all those who keep waiting for Internet marketing to replace TV, there was an interesting story in eMarketer today that shows how insurance companies are using both TV and search as a one-two punch. eMarketer reported the results of several research firms and adds its own (correct) conclusions.

Even with competition from Internet-based movie services, cable and satellite on- demand, and digital cinema, the DVD continues to attract most of the consumer spending on movies, according to the 2007 Annual Report on the Home Entertainment Industry out today.

While browsing websites for gift ideas, I am constantly seeing the awesome potential of multimedia. Now that there are multiple social websites for almost every kind of media, the potential for customers to be exposed to your experience is limitless, and really inexpensive.

Recent Sony news presents an interesting case study in the difference between advertising and marketing. For just as the company was marginalizing yet another group of people and offending the politically correct, sales of PlayStation 3 soar upon price cuts.

MovieTickets.com, an online movie ticket provider says their online ticket sales have increased 31 percent in the first half of 2007 compared to the same time period in 2006.

To a business, user reviews can be a valuable asset.  They can also be quite a risk – what if the reviewers don’t like your products or services?  Yet, as usual, knowledge is power (unless you know that you’re screwed), and so here are four things to realize when it comes to user reviews.

The post-Terry Semel era at Yahoo sees a shakeup at the top of its cross-platform, North America sales team, as Wenda Harris Millard moves from the portal company to Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

New statistics have indicated that online sales are slowing, and this has worried some people.  Yet “slow growth” is still growth, and – some projections accompanied those stats – even if 25 percent per year (in 2004) was great, nine percent (in 2010) won’t be too shabby.

The eBay Developers Conference in Boston offers up some juicy tidbits for online retailers, from forthcoming third-party applications and research tools to ways to hire certified developers to create widgets for your website.

Online video ads are converting to sales, according to the Online Publishers Association (OPA) "Frames of Reference: Online Video Advertising, Content and Consumer Behavior" report.

While online reviews written by consumers is nothing new, they can be a useful tool to convert shoppers researching a product online according to a study by MarketingSherpa and Prospectiv.

Close to six in 10 respondents "strongly or "somewhat" favored sites that featured product reviews written by fellow shoppers, while only 14 percent said they did not trust reviews written by their peers.

Results were the same whether shoppers made their purchase online or off.

One word that causes a great deal of problems is Webmaster. Perhaps many will disagree with me, but hear me out. I acknowledge that it will be difficult to bury the word. After all even the mighty Google helps to support the word through its immensely useful Google Webmaster Central. However I believe this word and the function that it implies can create a great deal of organizational dysfunction, particularly in big companies.

U.S. online retail is maturing quickly. One indication is that e-commerce sales growth will drop below 20 percent for the first time next year.

With maturing Internet sales, along with the possible slowdown of the U.S. economy, year over year e-commerce sales are expected to be lower. eMarketer estimates online retail sales will grow 21 percent to $131 billion this year. During the next four years, sales will increase at 17 percent compound annual growth rate.

At the end of the day, it’s about sales, not traffic. And if it’s about sales, then it must also be about people, not clicks. This seemed to be the focus of yesterday’s one-day SEW Live in Columbus, OH (you might call it SES Lite), as marketers explore the transition from search engine marketing to social media marketing.

Many companies are not aware of the different roles that various departments in their organization will fill when they begin to work with an outside SEO firm.  What follows is a demonstration, in play form (bear with me), of which internal departments are involved in a typical SEO campaign and why. It also demonstrates some of the resistance that may be felt by those departments as well as what valuable contributions a company can make to help its SEO firm craft a successful campaign.

The Players