We’re over the moon at Qube that we’ve been chosen to develop the online marketing side of West Sussex County Council’s year long drive safety campaign.

Alongside Zero Fifty One, who are providing the offline advertising and creative, Qube will help West Sussex to communicate to the hard to reach 17-24 age group with a number of online and social media marketing campaigns throughout the year, focusing on drink driving, using a mobile while driving and seatbelt use, amongst other things.

A belated welcome to Graeme Benstead, who joined Qube this month in the role of online marketing executive.

Graeme was formerly one of the director’s of Heavenly Media, with an excellent track record in search marketing and social media. He also comes with a host of analytic, design and technical skills and is already proving a valuable member of the team.

So say hello to Graeme, everyone

PS. Graeme has just asked me to add something to this post about his charming smile. So consider it done, mister B.

The online world was a very different place back in 2004 when the last US election was underway. The word blogging was only recently starting to slip into society’s vocabulary, YouTube had yet to delight us with its thousands of online video’s on demand and twitter was not even a twinkle in Jack Dorseys’ eye.

This time round everything has changed. my.barackobama.com has the democratic candidate using every social media tool in the book. Read his well-tended blog, sign up to get live news and events near you, follow him on twitter as he tours the country and even make friends with other Obama supporters.

But it’s not just the candidates and their campaign teams engaging our attention using these tools. This year anybody that has an opinion and an internet connection is sharing their opinions and even hitting the headlines.

Issues which may have been downplayed, or even wilfully ignored in the past, are now dragged into the spotlight in all their gory detail by amateur bloggers. The controversial remarks made by Obama at one of his fundraisers would probably never have been mentioned again if it hadn’t been for 61-year-old ‘citizen journalist’ Mayhill Fowler whose report rocked the delegates campaign.

Effectively Social Media has created a decentralised press in which our reporter’s perspective is not influenced by the threat of losing a wage. It’s a distributed medium that can’t be manipulated by even the most powerful of individuals.

The industry press is full of speculation and scare-stories on a predicted downturn in online ad spend this year.

Even given it comes to pass (and some are saying exactly the opposite) – should the wider world of online marketing be worried?

I don’t think so. The credit crunch might have brands carefully scrutinising their ad budget, but an increasing amount of money’s been making its way into other areas of online – social media and search engine marketing etc – for a while now.

While the general internet audience has become more apathetic towards banners and pop-ups, the younger media of SMM and SEM are now recognised as being both measurable and effective.

Even if cutbacks are on the way, it’s less likely they’re going to be in areas of marketing that are engaging customers and reaping rewards.

While trawling the web, I found this article relating to some research done by the Spelling Society – as a web marketing agency with a content and copy background, it struck a chord – people really can’t spell anymore.

http://hansonsearch.typepad.co.uk/hansonblog/2008/06/truble-speling.html