MarketingProfs conducted a survey to see how the economy is affecting marketing decisions. How are companies responding? They asked 600 marketing professionals about their plans for the future. When times are lean, businesses often cut their marketing budgets. The grim news is 65% of marketers expect negative effects on marketing overall. And they expect the affects will be long term - with 75% expecting it to last into 2010.

Tokoni , is social network started last year by former Skype President Alex Kazim and former eBay execs including Mary Lou Song and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. It's also backed by eBay. The site has been picking up content, building up to a formal launch this week. The social network gathers people's stories. Tokoni is a Tongan word for "help," and the founders hope that reading other people's life will help enhance your life.

When auction revenue falls, eBay decides to bank on payment processing and online classifieds . eBay is buying online bill pay service Bill Me Later and two other companies which are based in Denmark. They're also spending quite a bit of cash - around $1.3 billion including Danish companies Den Bla Avis and BilBasene . Total spend comes to about $1.3 billion. Bill Me Later is an online layaway program where you can make payments on a purchase.

You don't see a lot of traditional advertising from Google . Their philosophy is to build great products and develop amazing technology and let it sell )and support( itself. Their marketing strategy has relied mostly on word of mouth - and its worked well. It just may not be enough for a company their size. That is slowly changing. Google looks to be shopping for an ad agency. They've looked at Madison Avenue agencies like Wieden + Kennedy and Taxi New York.

Musicians and their labels want Apple to increase the amount they make per digital music download. Apple says they would rather shut down iTunes music store . They are turning down a request for an increase of six more cents per song for music publishers and songwriters . Apple has insisted on keeping the price at 99 cents per download arguing that any price increase above that will make them unprofitable.

It's uncommon to see sales increase by double digits. HP had a new laptop called  Dragon. Sales were flat after trying traditional marketing. So they decided to try another way - engaging bloggers. A quick way to do that is to send bloggers an ultralight $5,000 laptop to give away to one of their readers. Nine months after launch, the 15 pound laptop with a 20.1-inch screen and 500-gigabyte hard drive wasn't selling that well.

Social networks are a great way to raise money for good causes. Just look at Nie Recovery - the family's plight made national news because bloggers banded to raise money for a family they had never met. MySpace and PayPal are using a new widget to help nonprofits gather donations on social networks. To participate, go to www.myspace.com/paypal and create a customized widget that can be virally copied and replicated on anyone's MySpace page.

LinkedIn.com - a social site for professionals - is partnering with CNBC to integrate news and other content. LinkedIn has over 27 million members but until now has had very little community-buildling or social networking features. Currently on LinkedIn you can email other professionals, ask them questions, and give or get recommendations from people in your network. Now you'll also be able to share information with them - something that is happening informally anyway.

Today I wish I were a political blogger. I supposedly had a ticket to the Democratic Convention, which fell through. Then I had the misfortune )in this situation( to live in a state that didn't get a lot of tickets. Some lucky bloggers - one from each state - were also part of the State Blog Pool or Corps )here's a list of the bloggers by state (. I have a feeling, that while it would be fun to attend the parties and see the speeches,

The Olympics is over and US advertisers should be pleased with the results. Not only did we take home a lot of gold from athletes, this Olympics brought record web site traffic - and an experiment in online video advertising. The two weeks long Olympics was a test in how video advertising would play out. According to eMarketer - NBC - the lead sponsor of the games, gets a bronze for their work. They brought in $5.75 million for running video ads.

The government can't be all that bad. They Twitter . They don't make us practice until we're almost dead for the Olympics . Plus they use other social media sites to communicate and encourage freedom of press. Now, if they could just let reporters live twit during press conferences it would look just like BlogWorld - speakers could look down at an audience of laptops. Silicon Valley nerds may be early adopters of social media - but the government is not only twittering,

The email newsletter Daily Candy , now going on its eighth year, got a sweet deal this week. Comcast is buying the company for $1.25 million . Rumors were that Comcast would pay far less - around $75 million and it's many times over their revenue. The pithy newsletters focus on what's hip and fashionable - marketing products to young women - and drawing national advertisers. Last year they expanded to include a kid's edition aimed at well keeled moms.

Let the games begin! The Olympics in Bejing have begun and Tibet monks aren't the only protesters - the media is angry too. While Chinese citizens may not have freedom of the press or Internet, but their Olympic guests expect it. And to be sure, the media was promised they would have full access to web sites. But reports are that not only are sites being blocked but that the government is monitoring Internet activity.

Google Insights for Search is like candy for Internet marketers fascinated with Google. It will surely lead to hours of searching and plotting. We are very interested in getting more information about how, why, and when people search the web. Google Trends was already useful but Google Insights gives much more information. If you run a paid search campaign, or if you're looking for ideas for a press release, or figuring out where the bulk of your customers come from,

Last March Google acquired DoubleClick and it's affiliate and search marketing arm Performics. That sent some chills up the spine of a lot of companies who saw it as a conflict of interest. Today it was announced that Google is selling a part of Performics, to Publicis Groupe , one of the top four global advertising companies. Just this June Google rebranded Performics to the "Google Affiliate Network" but seemed to have done little else with the division.

Tweens, the age group between 8-12 years old are unique in that they are the first group to have grown up with computer and internet access. They are also getting mobile phones and more grow up using them. My son who is almost 8 has grown up watching me blog and is now obsessed with Club Penguin. I admit it's a little disconcerting of thinking to marketing to him or the kids his age. But where there is a market'there are marketers' My son is a child,

For Marketing Pilgrim readers who love data - here is a follow-up to Rapleaf's social media study . The link has a spreadsheet that you can apply formulas to. The study looked at 49.3 million people on social networks and breaks them down by age and gender. This is good to study to look at if you want a general idea where to focus your marketing on a specific social network to a target customer.

Google AdWords advertisers that run content-targeted ads are going to have a easier time managing their campaigns. Until now the content and keyword ads were managed separately. A new feature combines both keyword-targeted ads and placement-targeted ads into one campaign and both will show ads based on keywords.

Real estate has been a more frequent topic recently on Marketing Pilgrim and I promised to write about recent stats on what real estate related terms people are typing in search engines . According to HitWise, the most popular web search volume for real estate sites goes to realtor.com. That's based on data collected for the four weeks ending Jan. 26, 2008. Hitwise is a subsidiary of Experian,

Social networking site ConnectU sued Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for stealing their idea. They allege he used the source code they hired him to create for their site. Now four years later Facebook is celebrating their four year anniversary, and that the lawsuit against them is finally settled - in Facebook's favor. Facebook asked that the case be dismissed, for lack of evidence, and that happened. ConnectU then filed another lawsuit against Facebook in March,