I think I discovered something I haven’t seen discussed before. I’ve been researching CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) on Twitter and what I’ve discovered is most of them follow only a few people and when followed rarely follow back. This brings up some questions that may embarrass them.

Why are they even using Twitter? After all, if they are a Chief Marketing Officer, shouldn’t they be listening to what their market has to say? Isn’t that Marketing 101?

Here are some possible answers I have come up with and I don’t like the implications of any of them:

1. They don’t give a damn.

2. They are on Twitter to stroke their own egos.

3. They think they are Oracles and everyone is holding their breath waiting for their next insightful statement.

4. They have someone on their staff Tweeting for them.

5. The most benign - they don’t get Social Marketing. This one can be fixed.

If anyone can give me a better answer or insight, please let me know because I’d like to understand and maybe even communicate with them. I sure would like to know.

In a joint survey conducted by Hearst Electronics Group and Goldstein Group Communications (GGC) it was discovered that companies with marketing budgets are moving to online marketing rapidly.

“This type of data reveals best practices among business marketers at a time of tremendous flux,” said GGC President Joel Goldstein. “The sense of urgency to move to online marketing has been felt by leading marketing organizations for some time now, but the extent to which budgets have been redefined is dramatic.”

This is because the quality of the leads is proving to be better.

“Part of the reason marketers are so willing to devote such a large portion of their budgets to online may be tied to lead quality. The single best source of leads, they report, is their web site, at 24 percent, followed closely by search engines at 19 percent. While one might expect that high spending for online tactics would lead to strong lead quantity, this question dealt instead with a marketer’s source of their BEST leads.”

What this means for Internet Marketers is they are going to have stiff competition in their niches if the larger companies are there too, once companies get what Internet Marketing is about. They are starting to show signs that the large companies do get it. For instance, they are starting to show up in social networking sites like Twitter and participating i.e. BestBuy and Comcast not to mention Microsoft and Apple.

In reality, this just reinforces that the small and medium business marketers are doing the right thing and since smaller is faster (remember the British defeat of the great Spanish Armada?) then the SMBs can be more focused and use guerilla marketing to profitably grow their businesses.

This is not to say that Direct Marketing is dead or even dying. It is to say that if the not so large companies are not using the Internet then they are missing a great opportunity to expand and survive during the current economic condition.