Q&As

Social networking sites tend to attract specific communities of visitors whose demographic and psychographic characteristics closely match those of specific audiences. As a result, such sites provide marketers with the opportunity to engage with highly targeted communities of users. Marketers can participate on these sites in numerous ways, including placing a search, display or contextual ad; posting a comment; tagging a piece of content with a keyword; or posting a link to their site.

Marketers do a good job at handling their in-house systems on a daily basis. But do they have the skill sets to access and track customer behavior? Michael Caccavale offers a primer on what marketers should consider about outsourcing

Its no surprise that public relations gurus were among the first to embrace social media. Learn what worked and why, and how marketers can make online networking work for them.

The era of Web 2.0 has brought to life a culture of passionate online users—the Netflix enthusiast, the fantasy football participant, the avid Flickr fan, the bakery connoisseur, the RSS/news aficionado. They share an active spirit of participation and the desire to make their niche interests a part of the collective conversation online. They create the dialogue, they direct others to content and they can make branded messaging prolific. All you need do is listen.

In a Web 2.0 world, it only takes one disgruntled Internet savvy person to sink your business. Find out how you can control the damage by self-styled activists and emotional hypochondriacs.

Italian gunsmith Beretta’s spring catalog bears an Olympics theme, starting with the cover photo of Andrea Benelli, the 2004 Olympic gold medalist in men’s skeet shooting, who used a Beretta shotgun to capture his medal. A 6” x 9” package from Environmental Defense, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ecological protection and preservation, features a picture of a polar bear and two cubs, polar bear address label fremiums, and a chance to earn a plush polar bear with a donation of $15 or more. And Cell Phones for Soldiers, a nonprofit that collects used cell phones in order to provide U.S. troops with the means to call home, has included a red, white, and blue 9-1/4” x 6” postage-paid reply envelope in which potential donors can send in cell phones. The piece is distributed in packages that arrive from Amazon.com.

Having won a settlement with AT&T Mobility, Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum is now setting his sights on Verizon, Sprint/Nextel, Alltel and T-Mobile. The state will

The Virginia Supreme Court has upheld the nation

The Federal Trade Commission will reconsider its green marketing and packaging guidelines, the commission said last week. They were last revised in 1998.

Deborah Platt Majoras has resigned as chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, effective later this month, the FTC announced last week.