There’s lots of news today about a possible recession. The Federal Reserve made the biggest rate cut in 24 years today to head a recession off at the pass but the stock market isn’t really responding well so far. While a recession (or even the hint of one) will increase fears in many traditional sectors of media and marketing, I think new media marketers will benefit from this and here’s why….

• Blogs don’t cost anything to start.
• Online video is free. So is creating your own video channel on YouTube.
• Creating a Facebook group doesn’t cost anything.
• Recording a podcast costs next to nothing.
• A basic Flickr account to engage your customers is free.
• Twitter doesn’t charge to message the people most interested in what you are doing.
• AdWords only cost you something when someone clicks your ad (and you determine the cost per click.)

There will still be marketing in a recessed economy. There will still be marketers spending money in a recessed economy, even if there’s not as much of it. What marketers will be paying for, however, is not the use of the technology, the air time to broadcast it’s message, or the placement for ads. What they’ll pay for is help to use the new media well. When in the face of decreased marketing budgets new media will emerge as the cheaper option because companies will pay consultants (i.e. digital coaches) a few thousand dollars to teach them how to fish the new way. This may be the tipping point for new media marketing as marketers and advertisers give it a shot out of financial necessity rather than being convinced that it’s the right thing to do. Whatever the case, a recession is going to be good news for new media marketing. It’s bad news for traditional advertising and marketing, but Google was already telling us that.

I spent some time on Google Trends today as I was thinking about web 2.0 tools for marketing compared to traditional marketing methods. You may recall I consider traditional promotion strategies the big fish of marketing (and I advocate going after the far more numerous small and medium size fish.) In my first test I compared direct mail, tv ads, billboards, and radio advertising.

One note about Google Trends before we proceed…this is just showing the relative quantity of Google searches on the given search terms. It may be easy to dismiss this but as Steve Rubel said in this post, “search engines show us what’s on everyone’s mind,” and it’s therefore interesting to note the trends of the collective thinking.

Here’s what the trends show over the last four years in these traditional marketing areas:

What you see here is that all but billboards are down from four years ago. Direct mail seemed to fall slowly and then hold fairly even in 2007. TV ads appear to have the most dramatic swings. Incidentally, notice the spike in TV ads early each year. Those are Super Bowl commercial searches for sure. Radio was down a little but steady for the last four years, though clearly below the other three areas.

After I looked at these four areas I included the term “web 2.0″ to see if that mere term competed with these traditional mediums. Here’s what I found:

Web 2.0 really didn’t take off until late 2005. By early 2006 you see that it eclipses the four traditional terms and then clears them significantly through 2006 and 2007.

Just for fun I tried one more trend comparison by throwing “blogs” into the mix. I dropped radio ads from the comparison since it was at the bottom of the pile and here’s what I found:

With “blogs” included it makes everything else just look silly. I was actually surprised it was such a huge difference. More surprising to me was that it was higher even back in 2004. We know that there were less than six million blogs at most in 2004 so it’s a bit curious to me, but quite interesting.

So what can we derive from all of this? At the very least we know there are far more searches for “web 2.0″ and “blogs” than than any of the traditional marketing methods. Even if all those searches weren’t marketing related (and we know that’s the case), the phrase web 2.0 is a business, marketing, and technology term. We can discern that the collective marketing and business interests are greatly interested in web 2.0 from these trends and if that’s where they are, it’s reasonable to look more seriously at them if you still have doubts.

One final one for kicks if you’re interested. Who do you think wins in a match up of MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Google, and blogs? See it here.

Imagine we’re in a deep sea fishing contest. You and me. It’s a fishing contest for a full day. At the end of the day the winner is the one with the most fish by weight. Though we’re in the same contest we have two different approaches. You have assembled the best deep sea fishermen you can find. You have expert marlin anglers since the marlin is one of the biggest (one marlin can weigh over 800 pounds…here’s a 560 pound marlin) and most prized fish you can catch. You have the best boat and technological advances for finding the marlin. Catching a marlin is hard work but you’ve hired the best in the business and you know when you come in at the end of the day with several big marlins everyone is going to be very impressed with your catch.

My crew has decided to take another route. We’re going to fish with nets. Our boat and crew is smaller and less impressive than yours and we’re going to catch salmon. Salmon are considerably smaller than the marlin weighing anywhere between 6 and 100 pounds each. I know, however, that salmon swim together and a good catch could put us in contention for the prize.

At the end of the day we return with our catches. You had a great day with nine large marlins with a total weight of 5,300 pounds. We only had one catch with 400 salmon. As we offload our salmon on the scales we estimate the average fish in our catch is 28 pounds, much smaller than your large marlins but our team’s total catch weight is 11,200 pounds. It turns out the cumulative weight of many smaller fish is much heavier than a few really big fish. We win.

New media marketing is a small fish strategy. I think that’s why traditional marketing mindsets are unsure of it. They’ve never considered a small fish strategy because it’s the exact opposite of their focus. Big fish are traditional promotional strategies. Big fish marketing tactics include magazine ads, television and radio spots, billboards, newspaper ads, direct mail campaigns and the like. Small fish marketing includes new media tactics like blogs, podcasts, social networking, online video, social media, etc.

Big fish know they’re prized and know everyone wants to catch them which makes them harder catch. They require more effort and more expense with less yield. Small fish are numerous and concentrated. They’re cheaper and easier to catch with a higher cumulative yield.

Marketers are fishing every day. Most are going after the limited supply of big fish. A few are going after the hundreds of thousands of smaller fish. Sure, it’s great to catch a big fish if you can. Catching big fish is what the industry was built on. Sometimes a really big fish gets you raises and recognition and may even bring a high return.

A funny thing is happening now though. There are more and more small fish all the time and the means to catch them are widely available, easy to use, and often free. Once you know how to catch a lot of smaller fish why would you ever try to catch a big fish again? Forget the big fish.