Happy New Year. In spite of the recession this year promises to be a happy one, especially if your business planning has you involved with the online world of advertising and social media.

On the day before Christmas, Business Week’s online magazine published a viewpoint by Jeffrey Rayport, founder and chairman of Marketspace, in which he compares the plight of shrinking expenditures on every other form of advertising excepting for the online variety. The article is titled “Why Online Ads are Weathering the Recession.”

Rayport’s premise is, “In most media, 2009 will bring unkind cuts, and Madison Avenue will never be the same. But Internet advertising seems to be holding up.” While the title of the article implies a focus on advertising, his arguments also support effective use of social media marketing.

Rayport, a former faculty member at the Harvard Business School, lists a handful of arguments supporting his observation. First, online media has come of age since the mid-2000s. It has become institutionalized.

Digital media provides for accountability that is more illusive in other forms of media. Metrics are possible in ways that are more illusive in other forms of media.

Word of mouth and social media are rapidly becoming recognized as increasingly effective at influencing buyers’ decision making. While no one is exactly sure how this phenomenon is going to play out in the future, it’s evident that the most prominent social networks – Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. – are already working to capitalize. Marketers from across the spectrum will follow.

Online media is opportune for creating “earned” rather than “paid” ad placements of a sort. Content created by bloggers and other social media enthusiasts can be much more credible with consumers than any form of paid advertising. When companies engage with consumers in open and authentic ways on the social web, new channels are created that naturally increase credibility.

Online media efforts allow for very exact targeting of the people and markets desired to be reached. By targeting potential customers where they congregate online, based on interest and activities, expenditures of advertising and other online communications efforts are more efficient.

The article concludes by stating what many of us who’ve been involved in social media have been saying for years; traditional forms of advertising and media won’t disappear, they will just forever be changed. The recession appears to be further proving the inevitability of the previously noticed trends.

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