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.

Gary Spangler, e-marketing manager at DuPont, recently stepped into a new role at DuPont that sharpens his focus on social media marketing. He describes the role as part educating and part cheerleading. He also provides oversight and governance. Spangler shared his thoughts on social media marketing, integrating social media with other media channels, and why he doesn't like the word advertising.

Damon Ragusa, CEO and Founder of Thinkvine, sat down with Contributing Editor Sara Holoubek at ad:tech Chicago last week to discuss the state of marketing mix modeling and why it is important to put the consumer back into the equation.

Last month, TechCrunch published an anonymous post, "The time has come to regulate search engine marketing and SEO." The author made an appeal to the government to regulate both Google and the search engine marketing industry. Statements and accusations flew back and forth in the comments section of the post, as well as across the Web. Now that the dust has settled a bit, contributing editor Sara Holoubek reached out to a few industry leaders to separate fact from fiction, with the end goal of informing direct marketers how best to interpret the key points.

One month into the life of Bing, Microsoft's revamped search engine, the industry is buzzing over initial promising usage statistics and market share claims. Yet others are more cautious, suggesting that short-term usage stats do not necessarily equate with a change in consumer behavior and long-term market share gain.

In a bold move, Topsy Labs Inc. recently launched Topsy.com, a social Web search engine, and announced that it was backed by a handful of prominent investors to the tune of $15 million. The news confirmed what many marketers had anticipated - a move towards a social Web where the end destination is less important than the ability to rapidly discover and share the most important content.

Following Apple's announcement of 1 billion iPhone app downloads in just nine months, Compete released its quarterly Smartphone Intelligence report, indicating 28% of smartphone users have spent $5 to $50 on a mobile application. These early signs of ancillary revenue have marketers asking what it takes to build a successful mobile application — and what the price is.

Social media, social networks and now the social graph. The language might sound modern, yet the concept is timeless. Brad Fitzpatrick, a Google engineer and a respected thinker on the subject, describes the social graph as "the global mapping of everybody and how they're related." Fortunately for marketers, technology not only enables connections between people, but between people and brands.

Over the past decade, self-publishing platforms, such as blogs and YouTube, have made it significantly easier for a market­ing manager to both craft the message and press "send."

If you thought the days of sponsor men­tions were in the past, guess again. Advertis­ers, such as Warner Brothers and Janome, have found that custom content integration with Next New Networks can successfully reach targeted communities online.