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.

Google AdWords are one of the most simple yet mysterious forms of advertising you’ll ever find. On the one hand it’s so simple and accessible because anyone can create an AdWord campaign. It’s not as if you need to go through an advertising agency or marketing firm to do it. Just visit the site, set up your campaign, and determine what your maximum daily budget will be. It’s that easy.

On the other hand, it’s a little mysterious how Google determines things like an AdWord quality score (meaning how much you should pay for your AdWords and what position they’ll be found in on the search pages) and cost per click. There are some factors that certainly play into things like a high quality score such as a high click thru rate, text relevance between the ad and the page you send people to, and historical keyword performance.

All that being said, there are some things you can do with your AdWords to help your chances. Here’s a here is a formula for Google AdWords I’ve seen work well with several clients:

Headline: Use a descriptive title for your product/service
Line 1: State a benefit or additional description of the product/service
Line 2: State a call to action
URL: Link to a page with text that upholds any claims in the ad

Most people understand the headline and line 1 aspects pretty well but stumble on the call to action. Use words like try, buy, order, find, or browse in that line. A sample call to action line might be “Try a free sample of our product.” The only catch here is that if you’re going to say this you need to make sure there really is a free sample on the page you send people to or Google will recognize that as a misleading (they refer to it as irrelevant) claim which at best raises your cost per click price and at worst will void your ad altogether.

I had the chance to do the web 2.0 overview presentation to a group of marketing professionals today consisting mostly of graphic designers and copywriters (and I also said I’d give a shout out to Ben H. who asked if I would be blogging about the presentation).

The presentation always covers the good old “massive Volkswagon” (MASSVW) that I’ve written about previously. A recent addition to the presentation was a discussion on the shift in the marketing messaging due to web 2.0. Specifically, it breaks down into two areas: tone and brevity.

Tone: The shift in copy tone is informal, conversational and fun. Compare the following, two email marketing companies tell the public about themselves in very different ways. The first takes the traditional approach and the second takes the new approach:

About Lyris:
Lyris Technologies, a subsidiary of J.L. Halsey Corporation, is a pioneer in the email technology industry. Since 1994, the company has been at the forefront of developing world-class email marketing software and services, while maintaining a record of strong profitability and compound annual growth.

As the choice of more than 5,000 major corporations and growing businesses Lyris’ flagship product, Lyris ListManager, is one of the world’s best-selling software solutions for email marketing and deliverability, while Lyris ListHosting offers the same powerful capabilities in a convenient, on-demand web-based solution.

About Emma:
In late 2001, Will Weaver and Clint Smith (known in more familiar circles as Will and Clint, or the Tall One and the Not-So-Tall One), began researching the email marketing and communications field. The two had recently started a company they named Cold Feet Creative, and their intent was to apply their sense of style and interface design to a niche market where, against other, more complicated software applications, they might stand out. Email Marketing, with its TargetBlasters and Contact2000s and MailBaboons and MailBaboonTargetBlasters, would do nicely.

So they built a prototype and called it Emma. They liked the name “Emma” because it formed a nice and handy abbreviation of the phrase email marketing and because it brought with it an inherent human quality. It’s a real name - like Antoinette or Frederick, only shorter. And that was what these two gentlemen were after - a way to bring software to life, but not literally because the software might decide to begin lopping people’s heads off, or running out for sandwiches at extremely inopportune times.

Brevity: With many of the web 2.0 technologies, the opportunities to be verbose are simply not available many times because the technology won’t allow it. For instance, a Google Adword doesn’t allow more the 25 or 35 characters on a line. Many text messages don’t receive more than 160 characters and the popular micro messaging system Twitter doesn’t allow more than 140 characters per message. Word counts don’t apply in this new micro messaging shift, rather character counts (which includes each letter, number, space, and punctuation mark) are the new constraints on a message.