I read a blog post from Mark Simon today titled, Insider Data Trading and quickly came to the conclusion that I am happy to be in sales and not directly responsible for marketing or the spending and allocation of marketing funds at Compendium!  The conversion, or soon to be conversion, of the big three (Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft) as it relates to their acquisitions of online campaign management software companies continues to convolute the ultimate purpose.  Mark's post raises some serious concerns over the capabilities of these acquired solutions to provide insights (PPC rates for one) previously not readily available, to their new owners and how these insights could be used to manipulate PPC rates moving forward.  I hope that his concerns do not come to fruition, but only time will tell. 

We speak to hundreds of prospects on a monthly basis and the majority of them are actively looking for alternatives to customer acquisition via PPC, many of them are turning to Compendium and our Corporate Blogging software.  The uncertainty that Mark lays out in his blog post, in my opinion, further strengthens the need for alternatives in 2008.