If you ever watched the Jetsons, you may remember the machine that could make anything you wanted to eat. George, Jane, Judy or Elroy would walk up to the machine, say they wanted a sandwich, a beverage, or whatever their appetite desired at that moment- and it would instantly appear on a platter. They would then whisk it off to enjoy it like a meal prepared in a real kitchen. While this was just a futuristic fantasy of the time, and while technology has yet to create a machine that will make any meal for you, consumers today do want what they want, where they want, and when they want it.

In a recent seminar I attended, this trend was coined the ‘WII’ consumer- but regardless what you call them, the pressure is on marketers to position their brands in a non-obtrusive way to reach out to their audience. For traditional marketers, this requires stepping completely out of the box and finding creative ways to promote their products or services. The good thing is it’s not necessary to road block Times Square outdoor boards or glue coffee cups to the top of cars to get brand recognition, thanks to the multitude of tools presented by the digital era- SMS, Online Video, email…the possibilities are endless.

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The slowing economy might curtail consumer spending. But reduced spending itself can be inhibited if digital marketers have anything to do with it.

Target marketing company ICOM says its recent survey shows that U.S. shoppers are more likely to use coupons now that a recession is coming. Or, now that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke admits there’s a recession coming even though everyone else already thought as much.

ICOM’s questionnaire showed that 67 percent of respondents will be “much” or “somewhat” more likely to use coupons during an economic downturn. More importantly, digital coupons—as opposed to paper—are going to be big in the newly thrifty America.

Fifty-eight percent of consumers surveyed by ICOM said their coupon use would increase if they could download a coupon from the Internet and have it automatically connected to an “electronically swiped frequent shopper card.” In that vein, I’m thinking that ICOM’s revelations also bolster the potential of mobile coupons.

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In the past we’ve talked about some more traditional ways on how to get traffic to your site. Today, let’s discuss some of the new ways to do this that have started to crop up over the past couple of years:

Non-Text Traffic:

This means traffic from videos, images, and photos. Video-sharing sites are highly popular as are image- and photo-sharing websites. If you optimize your content (videos, images, photos) you might rank high within such sites, which will drive more viewers to your content.

In addition, this can also drive more traffic to your site from the dedicated and major search engines. The more popular your videos or photos the greater the chance your content will turn up when doing natural searches. That’s your additional traffic. You need to take video and image/photo optimization seriously as search engines are paying much more attention to it and will continue to do so in the future.

Wiki Traffic:

This is traffic from knowledge and encyclopedia sites. We all know Wikipedia’s links do not matter for SEO anymore. Yet, they still bring lots of traffic, which still surprisingly comes from search engines. This happens because lots of Wikipedia articles are still coming up on the first positions in both Google and Yahoo! for many highly searched terms and thus the most clicked as well. Inside the article page, people who are interested in the subject are exploring it further by clicking the external links. That’s how they come to your site through the searches.

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We’re no closer to reconciling concerns about the use of online behavior data. Indeed, several things happened over the past week proving that marketers, controllers of Internet information, and consumers aren’t likely to agree any time soon on the use of online-behavior information.

Because of concerns by both consumers and the government, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) late last year created guidelines to help the marketing industry self-regulate itself in the behavioral ad targeting space (see the proposed principals). Last week, in response to the FTC’s proposed rules, various industry groups and individual businesses said the FTC was too broadly defining “behavioral information.”

Marketers don’t have a problem with protecting personally-identifying details like names, physical and email addresses, and phone numbers. But the FTC, they said, does not do enough in its proposed guidelines to distinguish between this type of information and so-called “non-personally-identifiable information,” or N-PII, which is anonymous user data. N-PII is the information used by behavior-based technology to decide what kind of ad to display onscreen.

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