“When money is tight, consumers are constantly looking for deals. And, today, that means they are going online to search for better prices, selection and services. If they find them—forget brand loyalty—they will switch to new products or vendors in a clickbeat.

Marketers have four basic search options: paid search, contextual advertising, paid inclusion—all three are types of advertising—and search engine optimization (SEO).

While paid search gets most of the attention and money, marketers are increasingly turning to SEO to acquire new customers.

All four options will experience increased spending through 2013. By then total US search marketing outlays will reach nearly $23.4 billion, and marketers will be spending more on SEO than on contextual advertising. ”

Twitter is usually the example given as the biggest hyped application, but the least responsive in return for the time spent.

Actually, one of the blog authors said that he received no response at all from his tweets, or from using FriendFeed, and that was the basis of his blog post. In other words, how could social media gurus give it the hype that it is all about interaction, when no one interacted with him? He did admit that he still finds value in social media applications, but he doubted that “main stream” users would get noticed enough to continue to find value.

The other blog post was from an “old school” copywriter’s blog, written by Troy White, on The Total Package. This guy and his followers know all the ins and outs of copywriting and have used that skill to make a lot of money on- and offline. They were not finding any monetary value (wondering what the ROI was ) in using Twitter, and wondered if others found the same poor results. Paraphrasing, there were responders who felt the same way, no ROI value for all their time spent, they just did not “get it”. And still other responders tried to explain how they found value in using Twitter.

My thoughts are varied. The simple 140 character limitation of Twitter completely obliterates the copywriting skills of people who have used headlines and words, lots of them, to drive sales for many years. The medium is not what they are used to, but, that doesn’t mean others have not found ways to market using Twitter’s 140 characters, as they have.

Also, considering how many millions of people are using multiple social media applications, people are apparently finding alot of value. But, I personally do not find value in some types of tweets. For example, tweets from well known internet marketing gurus telling us that they had a cigar and what kind of wine with their dinner 10 minutes ago is just not valuable to me. The value to me is the fact that I can send a direct message, if I wanted to, to a well known internet marketer, or a pro basketfall player – no red tape. I am not using that application for actually socializing with these people I do not know. But, I also am using the applications to be social with people I do know.

So let me be more clear. For my friends, I would send a short personal message. But following an “important” person, I find humor in seeing a silly personal type message go out to a gajillion people thinking they would care. However, it seems that lots of “important” people think this is what they should do. And you know, thinking about how isolated some of them are from all of us, I guess they have no idea how to interact anyway. Authenticity, yes, that is an issue. This way they can still dodge the autographs, and believe that they are interacting with their peeps.

There are hundreds of uses for Twitter. Some like it for social interaction, some like it for marketing, some like it simply because it is the new trend. You just can’t suggest the whole thing is useless if you are not getting your expectations met. It is still new. Keep looking for the value, it really is there.