Recently, Rapaport reported some figures about Valentine’s day campaigns. Lots of bucks are being spent on V-day campaigns, and no doubt, like the Dog House ad, it’s a full media experience. Although:

But for the average Joe — who never caught these announcements — it is more likely that he’ll simply type ”diamond ring” into Google to begin the shopping process. In a rather brief observation of the results of such a search, there turns out to be plenty of room for your brand to capture his attention.

Usually when I look for things it is by using the search box. Back in the day, you had to first type in ‘www.google.com’ or ‘www.yahoo.com’ before beginning the search process; now there’s a little box at the top corner of every browser. Heck, Firefox will even interpret an improperly typed address as a google (or other) search.

In light of this, everyone is searching for a ‘total solution’ – everyone wants to be at the top of ‘diamond ring’ search results. Mentions on cnn.com, a snazzy, sparkly new web site that seamlessly integrates with the retail experience. One of the big problems with the internet is that instead of having one main street in each city with thousands of people, you have one main street total with millions of people. Tough for the smaller offering.

It’s also interesting to see the solutions offered by various firms, most have not even begun to touch on the notion of the things that really matter – the relationships with customers – and stick mostly to showcasing easy ways to make technology work for you.

Only recently have we begun to see a focus on social networking, with the explosion of the use of facebook (for one) but its presence in the retail world has been minimal. The news organizations have really taken to it – I suppose in part because in the recent climate for newspapers (even before the recession) anything FREE looks mighty nice. Through this the retail world has been touched, for example, by Baltimore Restaurant Week.

But nobody has a great solution. It is important to remember that most things that are ’simple’ are either deceptive or only the beginning of the actual solution. My work as a programmer has taught me this. And social media is new – at least in this incarnation – the noise in the data is great and nobody is sure where the money is yet.

Probably? We all do what we did that worked before, but now online.

And anyway, we shouldn’t become enthralled by novelty; for one, people still have mailboxes. It will be interesting to see how effective mailings are when all of the spammers have switched to twitter and blog comments. (We see you guys, and so does akismet!) Heck, I love it when I get a letter. Even if stamps are what, 43 cents?

You’re wondering: what happened to the video we promised! On review, we decided to something bigger with it. (That’s biz-speak for please wait…

PS – If you’re not on twitter, what are you waiting for? You’re missing some deals, man. Make sure you retweet cool stuff!