It seems that despite all the sources BT claims it will get you "contacts" from, it's likely that most will come from good old pay-per-click advertising. Funnily enough, the fixed-cost approach to managing PPC advertising (e.g Google AdWords) is one which many of our clients are finding interesting, but I wouldn't have the nerve to ask for the rates BT is asking for, nor do we lock people into 12-month contracts or charge setup fees. Nice work if you can get it though.

A number of you have started to ask us for additional services, such as AdWords campaign management, and Jackie will be ensuring that you're all looked after. More importantly, there's been some enthusiastic response to our suggestion that we run some paid-for workshops in the autumn, and Jackie will be bringing her formidable organising skills to those events. Expect to hear from her soon.

You might be interested to know that Jackie is writing her own blog, which will address wider marketing issues than my daily one. She's lining up some interesting guest writers, and promises not to post more than a few times a month, so I really think you'll enjoy reading it. You can sign up to get new article notification via RSS at the blog itself – or receive notifications by following the blog's Twitter feed. However, for the more conventionally-minded, everything will be wrapped up in a newsletter which I strongly recommend. You can sign up for Jackie's free monthly email right here, right now.

Mark reckons that the immediacy and effectiveness of modern product advertising, coupled with a decline in brand advertising, could be detrimental to the quality of product design. If a component which will just "do the job" can be sourced quickly and cheaply, without any real advice from a knowledgeable supplier, he argues that buyers will find themselves with no more resources than are needed to do just that. What's more, with no brand marketing, they will feel less inclined to stick with the same manufacturer in the future (if they can even remember who it was). The cycle will be ever cheaper, less fit-for-purpose components, and poorer end products.

It's an intriguing argument. However, I think that it assumes that branding through advertising plays a larger part in customer loyalty than it does nowadays. What the irritatingly flippantly-named "social media" offers manufacturers is the opportunity to engage more closely than ever with their existing customers, and create levels of brand loyalty which advertising and sponsorship has never been able to manage. Of course I'd say this, because one of the things I do is to set up email newsletters, blogs and Twitter feeds for companies like yours. But these allow you to create real user communities for less than the cost of wasteful branding advertising, and reach far more customers than corporate golf days ever could.

Many companies I've done business with now ensure brilliantly that I never "get away", but in acceptable ways that make me want to do more business with them. I'm sure you can think of a few who've kept you on board you in the same way, such as banks, car dealerships and utilities companies. Is your engagement with your customers moving on to the next level?

However, in a week when we've brought up the question of how trade magazines can survive, there's been much discussion on the wider question of "free vs paid-for" media and where it's taking us, thanks to a critical analysis by "thinker" and author Malcolm Gladwell of a new book by another widely-read writer, Chris Anderson. There are powerful arguments about where things are heading, which is why Seth Godin points out in "Malcolm is wrong" that "For a long time, all the markets for attention-based goods are going to be messy". But as he says, "This means that there are going to be huge opportunities".

What's rarely mentioned is that trade magazines might have been ahead of the game on all this. While online publishers and media creators of all types run around wondering how they're going to make a living now that everyone expects everything to be free, trade magazines have been free for years. If anyone ought to have ideas on how to generate revenue from non-traditional sources, it ought to be the people who long ago took monetising their products from advertising to the limit.

You may be thinking: "What's all this got to do with us, Chris?" Well, it's another step on the trend which has moved us from waiting to be told the news (print), to going to find it out ourselves (web), and now to telling each other. You might think "social media" is of no help to your attempts to sell blue widgets, and it probably isn't. But increasingly I'm thinking it will be. Do you wish you'd set up a customer email newsletter in 1994 (even if there were only a few readers out there), so that you had your own 50,000 circulation, fifteen years on? Maybe those 10 people following your company's blog on Twitter are the 2009 equivalent.

Will the trends in the newspaper industry be reflected in the printed media we use in industry – the "trade mags" and other journals? I believe they face two insurmountable problems. The first is the "I've read about it already" problem which the newspapers are failing to cope with. Despite having had years to plan for a changing market, most trade mags are still publishing as much "product news" as they did ten or twenty years ago, desite the fact that nowadays, a far higher proportion of their readers will already have read the news in more frequent online newsletters – or, increasingly, directly from you. The only way for these titles to remain relevant is for them to concentrate on analysis. Unfortunately, that's much more expensive than reprinting press releases, which brings us onto the second of their problems.

Microsoft's Steve Ballmer recently made the prediction that advertising in traditional media will never come out of this recession. He said that it has been "permanently reset" and that as the economy recovers, the gains will largely go to more flexible media. This could be a financial disaster for a lot of print media owners. Many trade mags are now running at a serious loss, and are banking on a pickup sooner rather than later to bail them out. It may never come. Is it true in your sector? Here's a quick exercise for you. Find the latest issue of a trade mag you read. You know the real cost of a page advert, so you can work out in 2 minutes how much revenue that issue has made. Now look at the list of staff. One of the three trade mags I have on my desk has about 20 pages of advertising at – what – £1000 per page? It apparently operates on an efficient-looking staff of about 6 people. Would £20,000 even pay their salaries? And we haven't even got on to the more substantial costs of printing and posting 15,000 magazines yet.

This does not look good to me. Very few people will benefit if the traditional trade magazine dies. I have a few ideas how to save it, and I know some people working hard in that sector who have some too. I just hope their publishers and advertisers listen to them.

Thank you.

I thought I'd pass this on because it may be of interest: Chris Rand, of a consultancy called Business Marketing Online, writes a short daily article aimed at marketing managers in the industrial sector. It gives some useful tips for business-to-business web and email marketing, and is available free by email every morning. You can add your name to the circulation at
http://www.bmon.co.uk/leadgeneration/get-new-articles-by-email/

Recent well-read articles include "What you need to put in your email signature" – http://www.bmon.co.uk/leadgeneration/2009/02/what-you-need-to-put-in-your-email-signature – and "10 reasons to do AdWords for your own company name" – http://www.bmon.co.uk/leadgeneration/2009/02/10-reasons-to-do-adwords-for-your-own-company-name/

Successful web marketing, however, has made it almost compulsory to give products names. People search, and you need to give them something to search for. So how do you go about dreaming up names? There's no doubt that if you can say a name out loud without embarrassment and write it down easily without worrying about the spelling, you're off to a flying start. I'm such a nerd, I applied the same principles to naming my son: not only did I not want him ever to get laughed at for having a daft name, I also didn't want him to have to spend his life telling people how to spell it ("that's Steven with a 'v', by the way…").

What you also need now is something which is rare, or even unique, on the web. Calling your next product the "Chelsea" range might sound nice, but you're not exactly going to appear on the first page of Google. If you want a unique domain name for that product (and you do), then your options are going to be rather limited.

In the search for a name which is memorable, not used in more everyday market sectors, and easily-spelled, a good brainstorming session down the pub is one approach. Another is to play around with one of the online name generators which have sprung up. These are primarily designed to find available website domain names, so they have the benefit of giving you that information too. Try namecombo.com, for example.

I assume you're not going to be spending thousands of pounds on getting some agency to do it. If you are, give me a few minutes, I'm off to start up a new consultancy…