THE MARKETING SPOT — In my recent podcast interview with local search expert Mike Ramsey, he emphasized the importance of customer reviews in the local search results: "Google, as well as gathering business information data, they gather reviews from all across the web...Companies that have reviews, especially those that have large amounts of reviews, it helps rankings." Mike Blumenthal has an excellent piece on his blog about Asking for Reviews, explaining how Texas apartment locating service, UMoveFree, collected and leveraged reviews. It's a great piece with some strong take-aways...

MASHABLE — As social media marketing becomes more widely practiced, the questions of the day are less frequently focused on the benefits of social media and more often focused on its implementation. Justifying social media to superiors is no longer the marketer’s biggest challenge. Instead, marketers are being challenged not on the potential benefits, of which there is ample evidence, but rather on how to get those benefits. Where to start?...

IMEDIA CONNECTION — Paid search has, and continues to be, one of the most effective ways of driving online sales. What you may not know is that paid search may actually be much more effective at driving in-store sales than it ever has been for ecommerce. Data from a comScore and Yahoo study (PDF) actually suggest that consumers exposed to search only spent $16 in store for every $1 they spent online. Analysis of cross-channel conversion data by RevTrax has yielded the same conclusion -- that each paid search click for a multi-channel merchant is far more valuable for in-store revenue than it is for online revenue. Given this data, it's no surprise that marketers are looking more and more to paid search as an incredibly cost-effective tool to drive in-store sales via use of a printable coupon. By combining paid search with consumer-initiated social media and email to facilitate virality, marketers can set the stage to make a big impact at a low cost in a way that is impossible with other marketing strategies...

NEW YORK TIMES — Beginning Thursday, latte addicts who visit Starbucks outlets can get more than just a caffeine fix. They will also be rewarded on Foursquare with a barista badge. Location-based mobile services like Foursquare are at the cutting edge of a transformation in the way offline businesses and their customers interact, by breaking down the barriers between the physical and the virtual...

CNET NEWS — It was apparently one step short of a cattle stampede when low-cost airline JetBlue used its Twitter account to announce that as part of its 10th anniversary celebration it would be giving out about a thousand free round-trip tickets at three undisclosed locations in Manhattan on Wednesday. "One of the things we knew was that people were just going to follow us," JetBlue public relations representative Morgan Johnston told CNET, relating anecdotes about one woman who claimed she sprinted in heels from midtown to the Financial District (one of the giveaway spots), people chasing the JetBlue team in taxis as they left one location to head to the next, entire offices clearing out when they heard that one of the ticket giveaways was nearby, and a cab driver who left his passenger behind in order to get out and claim a ticket. "It was like the Pied Piper of Hamlin." CNET caught up with Johnston, whose team orchestrated the stunt...