For some people, autumn conjures up thoughts of pumpkins, fall foliage and tweed suits. For marketers, it signals a 2-3 month stretch of excel spreadsheets, vendor reviews and endless negotiation. Yes, we are in the thick of planning season, and this year an uncertain economy will leave its mark on all line-items, search included.

It is still unclear which next-generation business models will dominate in the local advertising revolution. Local search still has not been perfected, and the local business market still struggles with the issues surrounding the effective integration and application of emerging media in their overall marketing mix.

Just one year after my 24-hour Gmail lockdown, I once again became a digital pariah. Except this time, I wasn't behind bars — rather, I was involuntarily removed from the 3G grid with no warning.

Once relegated to a small club of tech-savvy entrepreneurs, search has gained a seat at the marketing equivalent of the grown-up table and is a standard component of advertis­ers' marketing mix. For search marketers, this makes life harder.

Insights and optimizations from Web analytics data hinge on analyzing timely, consistent and accurate/clean data. To provide complete and centralized views of site activity and conversions, all online advertising should be tagged with Web analytics URL tracking param­eters. Beyond tagging, there are numerous ways to use Web analytics data to optimize paid search (PPC) campaigns.

While shopping over Labor Day weekend, I decided to join some friends in Chicago on a whim. It was about 3:30pm, so I needed to act fast if I was to leave by the end of the day. So, as any mobile savvy person would do in this situation, I pulled out the trusty pocket PC in the middle of the store and headed to Google mobile for rates and schedules from St. Louis.

With the major engines putting more and more focus on the number and quality of inbound links to a given site, search engine optimization (SEO) managers have turned largely to building more links to a site to help it rank as high as possible. However, if this is all that your SEO efforts focus on, you're missing out on a much bigger piece of the puzzle.

Multivariate testing has made it into the mainstream: tools like Google Website Optimizer and Widemile's Page Opti­mizer make sophisticated tests relatively simple.

Here I am, rounding the corner of 28th St. and Park Ave. in New York when, suddenly, I am hit by a guy coming at me with a flier for a local deli. A polite "no thank you" did no good — this last link in the marketing chain was listening to his iPod. Of all urban advertising vehicles, the people handing out fliers are definitely the most disruptive, much like a pop-up window that spawns an endless cycle of new pop-up windows.

While online marketers are racing to adopt today's newest social media techniques, many are missing opportunities in a tested, traditional marketing channel: press releases. Press releases? Absolutely.