3:00 - 4:30 p.m.

New Age Marketing Tools: Is Today's Hype Tomorrow's Help?

Introduction: As if dealing with the complexities of search engine, affiliate and e-mail marketing were not enough, the Internet has given rise to all kinds of new age marketing tools, every one of them hailed by its touts as the latest must-do tactic. But some are more successful than others, all have their specific applications and all have their benefits and drawbacks. For e-retailers who are more merchants than technical whiz kids, it is a daunting task to cut through all the hype regarding RSS, blogs, podcasts, viral marketing, social networking and other forms of new age marketing to discover their real potential for generating e-retailing sales.

Workshop Content: The last session of this year's marketing workshop will walk retailers through all of these newest forms of online marketing and help them understand:

• Which new marketing methods they should invest in and why.
• Which products and types of retailers get the most out of which kind of new age marketing tool.
• Which are must-haves right now and which can safely be ignored until the technology is more developed or more proven.
• What types of consumers respond best to what new marketing formats.
• What types of consumers are turned off by new age marketing.

About the Instructors: Pinny Gniwisch will discuss Ice.com's use of blogs and how the blogs have not only helped sales directly but also allowed Ice to appear higher up in search engine results. Boris Wertz will discuss Abebooks' acquisition of the LibraryThing.com social network, the challenges of operating it and the benefits that Abebooks has derived. Jeremy Lockhorn, who monitors the market for online companies' new forms of marketing, will talk about new marketing that he sees coming and will discuss the effectiveness of some of the new approaches that marketers are engaging in today.