There have been several posts recently comparing associations to newspapers. Maddie Grant reprinted a listserve comment and got a lot of comments on her post and at other blogs. The general gist of the original post is that newspapers are an industry in gut-wrenching turmoil, and so are associations. Somehow the whole thing turned into a discussion of “micropricing” – continued here on the Acronym blog.

Competitive intelligence is an ethical, simple, and valuable technique for market research. It helps to have as much information as possible about your target marketplace as well as how you will stand up against competitors.

Natural search marketers have been in a precarious position for the last few years. Much of the data they’re using is supplied by search engines, and some of that data is fuzzy at best.

The data classically used in search engine optimization (SEO) to benchmark sites and track performance is all but useless today. Ranking reports, still a necessary evil in SEO reporting, have been unreliable (at best) for at least 3 years. Their validity has been further marginalized over the last 24 months by way of Google’s increased use of personalization, localization and experimentation with blended results, to name just a few.