Despite the global recession, it seems one economy was doing really well over the last year. But quite interesting fact is, that economy doesn’t come under the radar of Word Bank, IMF or ADB, those who keep their eyes open all the time. Know where it happened? At Second Life.

Believe it or not, the virtual economy of Second Life, a popular online computer game that lets users create a new reality for themselves, doubled in size last year. Users spent more than a billion dollars on virtual goods over the last year, compared to $360 million for the year before. Second Life’s economy is now larger than the economies of nations such as East Timor, Samoa and Dijibouti.

Read the full post here

With the turbulent economy prevailing today, it’s a no wonder companies going for more efficient and cheaper marketing methods. Even though this seems like a paradox email campaigns are an exception.

According to a new survey, opt-in email makes travel consumers more likely to do business with a travel company, in addition to generating a more favorable opinion of the company and even a stronger sense of loyalty.

Travel emails inspire loyalty, favorable opinion

However for a successful mail campaign it’s vital to track the end result. Usually we could use a service like Campaign Monitor for this, but if you want do it yourself, here is a way to do it.

Tracking email campaigns in Google Analytics is done using a process called link tagging. This process is the manipulation of the links in your emails.

Tracking Email with Google Analytics

With the economic downturn marketers are looking for more efficient and
minimum cost solutions…which drives them back to old fashioned
email marketing campaigns.

>Old is new again, and boring is the new sexy. At least, that is what
we’re seeing with regard to email marketing’s renewed role as a central
digital communications hub during this rough-and-tumble economic time. A
recent StrongMail study showed that more than half (51 percent) of the nearly 1,000 global
business leaders polled plan to increase their marketing budgets in 2009
to focus on programs that yield a higher return on investment, such as
email marketing and search.

For more into email marketing – Email’s new role in digital marketing

Twitter – our favourite little micro blogging tool has opened  pathway
to a new way of communication and it’s becoming a mainstream
information channel. For both CurdBee and Hotelotravel Twitter has
become a handy tool to get more in touch with users and we can’t help
but fall in love with this handy gadget. How ever as much as popular
and useful it has become, it too has faced woes of economic collapse to
top off the lack of a proper business model to keep it sustained.

This quote pretty much sums it.

The bad news: The startup makes zero dollars — still. In this
economy — VC
funding is drying up, maybe you’ve heard — that means Twitter
could shutter as suddenly as it appeared.

To know the full story yourself follow this  – Announcing The Create A Twitter Revenue Model Contest

But on the plus side of the story, some good ideas have come up and you can
give your feed back to choose the best one out of them and try to salvage this handy way of communication. 11 Business Plans For Twitter

Amazing to see how giants like Google and Microsoft manage during the recession times. The latest quarterly results helped Google shares to gain 2.6% while dropping Microsoft’s by 10% in early trading.

Google is offering stock option exchange as an incentive for employees to stay with the company when Microsoft cuts 5000 jobs, the biggest reduction ever.