According to a recent survey of 1,745 business-to-business (B2B) Internet marketers, even the most effective B2B marketing tactics – such as website design, SEO and email marketing – were up to 50 percent LESS effective in 2011 compared with last year.

According to Marketing Sherpa, which conducted the survey, the upshot is that online marketers need to radically improve their game in order to meet the demands of B2B customers in the current economic environment.

According to Ryan Beldham, founder of MyWebRevolution.com, Google is a monopoly. In this interview, I asked Ryan why he thinks Google is a monopoly and what he thinks should be done about it. As a libertarian and fan of free markets I still think people are free to do business with Google or go elsewhere. What about you? Do you agree with Ryan? Share your thoughts in the Comments.

Anna: Why do you consider Google to be a monopoly?

Ryan: This is not an easy question to answer and is really the basis of my entire argument. But to try and sum it up, you must first know how to define a monopoly. I define it as a product or service that has exclusive control in its market space, and, must control the prices set in that market. It is important to note that this is a two-fold definition and gives a set of criteria for determining what a monopoly is.

Is the online casino industry consolidating? Or is CasinoRewards.com gambling on its acquisition of no less than seven (7) online casinos? (I couldn’t resist the pun).

CasinoRewards.com has just announced the acquisition of GrandHotelCasino.com, LuxuryCasino.com, ColosseumCasino.com, VegasSlotCasino.com, Vegas7Casino.com, VegasCountryCasino.com and VegasJokerCasino.com. The acquisitions bring CasinoRewards.com’s portfolio of online gambling websites to a total of 32 brands.

There are only seven (7) metrics that matter for Internet marketers, according to Geoff Ramsey and Vipin Mayar, authors of ‘Digital Impact: The Two Secrets to Online Marketing Success.’

Geoff Ramsey, CEO and co-founder of eMarketer, and Vipin Mayar, EVP of McCann Worldgroup, reckon Internet marketers need only master these 7 factors for Internet marketing success.

Microsoft’s global ‘SMB Cloud Adoption Study 2011′ finds that 39 percent of small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) expect to be using one or more cloud services within 3 years, up 34 percent from the current 29 percent of SMBs.

According to the study, the number of cloud services SMBs pay for will nearly double in most countries over the next three years. SMBs will increase the average number of cloud services they use from fewer than 2 to 3.3.

SMBs are particularly interested in software as a service (SaaS) providers in the areas of collaboration, data storage and backup, and business-class email.

Marco Limena, vice president, Business Channels, Worldwide Communications Sector at Microsoft observed:

“As cloud computing becomes more ubiquitous and SMBs’ existing IT becomes outdated, adoption will grow rapidly. Hosting service providers should consider the appropriate sales, delivery and support models to target larger SMB customers that are more likely to pay for cloud services.”

Research by Ernst & Young shows that interactive media was the fastest growing sector within the media and entertainment industry in the 2006 to 2010 period. Interactive media companies’ average profitability was 35 percent during the period, with profitability growing by 15 percent.

Traditional media companies, meanwhile, have seen their profitability wither, and their profitability DECREASE over the past four years. Publishers experienced an average 1 percent decline in profitability (based on earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization or ‘EBITDA’) in the 2006-2010 time period, whilst television networks’ profitability dropped by 4 percent, and music companies’ profitability dropped by 5 percent.

With its diverse online publishing properties – ranging from TechCrunch to the newly acquired Huffington Post – AOL wants to attract ever more readers to its network using a system that optimizes content for both readers and the search engines.

Well, readers are the ultimate target, but since AOL expects the search engines to drive 40 percent of its traffic, the company regards search engine optimization (SEO) as essential for generating a large number of those readers.

According to its publishing business plan, the AOL Way, AOL wants more direct traffic and less traffic from the search engines.

No surprises there. What online publisher – i.e. one that makes money by monetizing web traffic via advertising – doesn’t want to be less dependent on sources of traffic that Google, Bing, etc can switch off at any moment?

Following on from our series of articles on the AOL Way (the leaked document describing AOL’s publishing plans and processes), today let’s look at AOL’s operational processes for pumping out content day in, day out. AOL’s approach may serve as also a useful reference for systematizing your own approach to content publishing.

According to the AOL Way, here’s how a typical day should look for the content teams working on its various blogs (TechCrunch, Engadget, Huffington Post, etc):

With revenues and profits down substantially in 2010, what will AOL do to turn itself around in 2011? According to the AOL Way, the company’s plan for ‘content, product, media engineering, and revenue management’, it will focus on boosting content production, page views, ad revenues and profits.

Business Insider recently published the leaked AOL Way and, as mentioned in Kikabink News (see Dissecting AOL’s Business Plan, ‘The AOL Way’), we’ll be going through the plan and discussing the key take-outs of interest to Internet marketers in a series of upcoming articles.