Start the New Year off right. Focus on intelligent integration by leveraging all your online and offline marketing initiatives to create a solid, cohesive message that will reach a broader audience.

This past month Oneupweb released a new study that uncovered surprising holiday online retail buying trends from 2007. Internet Retailer and Multichannel Merchant were among those that covered this latest study. Check out these articles and more at OneUpWeb.com. And keep on the lookout for our follow-up study on the 2008 holiday online retail buying trends.

Search Engine Land and AOL are reporting that Barack Obama was the most popular name in the news in 2008, followed by Sarah Palin and the pregnant man. Elsewhere in the industry, online marketing took over NASDAQ for a day, with SEMPO chairperson Dana Todd ringing the bell on December 2nd.

Oneupweb is currently exploring new strategic business partnerships. The goal of this partnership program is to provide our clients with a network of trustworthy, complimentary service companies to tap into for additional needs. And there are benefits for you, too. As your partner, we become an ally—a positive extension of your team working toward the same goal. Find out more about our Strategic Partnership Program today!

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• After just two months, sales from the paid search campaign surpassed client projections by more than 47 percent.
• During that same two month period, visitors from the paid search program increased by more than 600 percent.
• After four months, the average monthly unique visits to the company's website generated by paid search campaigns were up a remarkable 750 percent.

Last month I hinted at a social media campaign Oneupweb had just completed involving our President-elect, Barack Obama. And since this is the holiday season—the season to be social—I wanted to share with you how we did it, and why it worked. I like to call it the story of Oneupweb vs. the Sign Thief.

At first, it sounds like a story straight from a Dragnet script. Every day prior to the Presidential election, we put out signs in support of now President-Elect Obama. Every night, those signs were stolen. But instead of hiring private detectives, we handled the situation a bit differently. And the result is a unique case study that shows how inexpensive, timely social media marketing can reap big results.

The Challenge: One-up the sign stealers.

The Strategy: Accustomed to one-upping the challenges we face—whether it's the industry wide stigma that branding is dead, or something on a more local level—Oneupweb developed a strategy that stayed true to our business and our roots. And all it took was a rented video projector, the three-story front of our global headquarters and a whole lot of creative talent and energy.

Using a popular television clip that featured Obama dancing on the Ellen Show, the Oneupweb design team went about stripping away the background scene, and re-created 93 frames of the video clip as a vector image. The task was completed in a few short days, in plenty of time for the election.

On Monday, November 3rd and Tuesday, November 4th (election day), 2008, Oneupweb employees manned their positions in a retro fitted company vehicle—standing watch as they projected a 30-foot tall Obama dancing on the front of our building. It was a silent dare for our sign thief to come and take that one down.

On the morning of the election, one employee posted a video of the event on CNN iReports, CBS Eye Mobile, Twitters election page and other social video sites. We also posted a Dragnet-style short film dramatization of our creation on YouTube and Facebook. As a team, we solicited friends, co-workers, family and business associates to comment on numerous relevant blog sites, providing links back to our video.

There was no press release, no media campaign, email blast or radio spot—the proliferation of this event was completely viral through the use of social outlets.

The Results: The sign thief didn't show his or her face. But many passersby honked, waved, pulled over, and a few even stopped in the street to witness the spectacle. Several people were seen making phone calls, texting and taking pictures with their cell phones, helping spread the word virally, creating even more buzz around the event. And that's not all. Within one hour of posting on CNN iReports, a CNN reporter was on the phone, eager to get all the facts. And, the video aired primetime on local TV stations as well as CNN and MSNBC the night of the election.

But what really stood out was the response from people all around the world, now made aware of Oneupweb and our digital marketing capabilities and services:

• Within one week, the video was viewed by more than 6,000 users.
• Visits to OneUpWeb.com increased over 120 percent the day the video was posted.
• The video appearing on YouTube and Facebook quickly became one of the leading sources of traffic to the Oneupweb corporate website.
• More than 40 percent of views in the first week of the campaign were from a viral source, having been viewed as a result of an indirect post.
• Within eight hours of posting the video on CNN iReports, it was the "newsiest" video on the site, with comments from around the globe ("Newsiest" is CNN's internal calculation that combines freshness, popularity, activity and ratings and is also what CNN's Producers use to indicate content for their stories).
• The video was also picked up and aired during prime time on CNN, MSNBC, CBS and a local news station.

I encourage you to start integrating social media into your marketing mix now, and well into 2009. Oneupweb offers cutting-edge social media marketing services, including blogging, podcasting, reputation management and more. To find out more about social media marketing, download our free Social Media Survival Guide. Then, give us a call at 877.568.7477 to discuss the social strategies that are best for your business.