SMS is more than a teenage communication technology; it can and should be a critical part of the marketing communications mix. The direct and brief nature of SMS (each SMS message permits a maximum of 160 characters, including spaces), allows marketing teams to deliver concise, targeted messages that customers will actually opt-in to receive.

Tom Phillips, former director of search analytics at Google, has recently stepped into a new role as President and CEO of Media6Degrees, a venture-backed start up. Two weeks into his new position, Phillips shared his thoughts on how next generation advertising will leverage the best of search, display and the social graph.

Welcome to "Patient Critical: Madison Avenue," where new and legacy media vehicles struggle to capture declining advertising dollars, deliver ROI and answer the question: What marketing media are worth saving? Digital media may have set the bar for sales-attribution reporting, but today, that's not enough. Delivering ROI requires an understanding of how all media work together and how spends should shift holistically to achieve the greatest net impact for a client.

Trends show that more and more online advertisers have been insisting on performance-based pricing over the last few years, largely based on the common belief that cost-per-action models reduce the perceived risks of display advertising. Despite conventional wisdom, however, that's not always the case.

More than ever, hard numbers are necessary to demonstrate success. They are incontrovertible, easy to communicate, and can point out what is or is not working. For new media darling Twitter, marketers are finding more tools to help them understand how their efforts are performing.

When you start to hear rumors of economic recovery and growth in the market, hiring isn't far behind. Online advertising and e-commerce hiring managers are looking forward to bringing fresh faces in to capitalize on that growth.

The importance of good site search cannot be overstated. A well performing site search improves your customers' online experience and helps them find products and information more quickly, and the more data you include in the search results, the easier you make the visitor's purchasing decision. Following are four quick steps you can take that will ensure your site search has an even stronger impact - both on your customers' experience and on your bottom line.

Video is all over the place. It is great for the audience. It is great for marketers too, but it takes up computing space. Lots of it. This is a serious problem that will impact creative marketing and advertising departments in particular. Video is quickly supplanting everything else as the method used to spread whatever gospel needs to be spread online and beyond. However, these bigger digital files are causing bigger headaches all the way around.

There are a number of reasons social media appeals to today's marketers: it's affordable, it's engaging for consumers and it's immediate. However, the real appeal of digital social marketing has been driven by new applications of data for targeted messaging and features that resonate with users. One recent example of this is TVGuide.com's September 16 launch of a widget using Facebook Connect, an open API from the social networking site.

Since search marketing is still a relatively young discipline with few truly veteran players, every day many bright young practitioners are getting promoted into their very first management roles. As I think back to my first managerial position, I cringe at the awful rookie mistakes I made, and savor the advice that more experienced managers gave to me that helped me get through the rough spots. Today, I thought I would share the one single insight that has helped me more than any other to improve my management skills.