My exposure to Interactive Marketing and Social Media has been ample and rapid in the last month, since I started my Internship with an Internet startup. In the quest to learn by doing, I have been using several different web services and trying out some Twitter clients (which there are a multitide of! Consolidation anyone?)

I recently realized how many social media profiles I have, and how difficult it has become to track friends' activities and keep in touch + network. Different sets of friends and contacts are spread out across Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Blogger, Gtalk, Shelfari, Flickr, Picasaweb, Ning and Slideshare and I frequently leave comments and update status messages across these networks. I felt the need for a platform where my friends could see posts from all my networks on one neat page. Conversely, I wanted the convenience of having to access just one page where I could see what my friends are reading / posting / commenting about.

“Most advertising tends to be”, Edward Kosner once said, "a trailing indicator of popular culture". 

This might have been true 30 years ago, but the scene today is different. Advertising is actually CREATING culture(s) and is more and more targeted at changing the basic psyche of the target customers.

John Wanamaker the man who invented department stores and price tag in 1870 famously said “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is, I don't know which half.” More than a century later the proverb still holds true and more so for the internet based advertisements. According to a Mckinsey research internet advertisements going to the wrong audience accounts for $332 billion of wasted resources of which $112 billion is spent in America alone. For any marketer this waste of resources is a night mare. In the following article we will try to look at the various tolls and technique which companies and agencies are using world wide to track their advertisement so that it reach the correct audience.