Svetlana Gladkova talks about a survey of online tools used by businesses for marketing.

So while you may think that social media tools are heavily employed by businesses for promotion, the survey has a surprise for you: in fact, only traditional internet tools are actually heavily used by marketing people so direct mail and web analytics are leading the game with 46% and 37% respectively. Other popular internet tools include online advertising (used by 35% of companies) and optimization for search engines (used in 34% of all cases).

At the same time the latest and greatest tools that we’ve only been hyping for a few years now all hold quite low shares in terms of use for marketing: for example, viral marketing, blogs, and podcasts each have 6% of companies using them with Twitter holding the last position in the list with its 2%.

Don’t believe the hype, people, thats all I’m saying. There are a handful of people and companies making millions off of Twitter, the rest are still trying to figure out what it is and how to leverage it as a new communications channel.

Joshua schachter, founder of the Delicious social bookmarking service, weighs in on url shorteners.

• any phone that can run a web browser and thus follow links can also run a proper client, and doesn’t have to hew to the SMS character limit.
• Shorteners are relatively easy and lightweight to set up. Adding a simple interstitial before the redirect provides an obvious way to monetize. And maybe someday all the link data will be worth something.
• With a shortening service, you’re adding something that acts like a third DNS resolver, except one that is assembled out of unvetted PHP and MySQL, without the benevolent oversight of luminaries like Dan Kaminsky and St. Postel.
• A huge proportion of shortened links are just a disguise for spam
• If the shortener accidentally erases a database, forgets to renew its domain, or just disappears, the link will break.

Well-reasoned responses to a new service in which few people are considering the negative implications.

TechCrunch says if (url-shortening service) bit.ly Is Worth $8 Million, TinyURL Is Worth At Least $46 Million. I personally can’t stand short url’s and I bet domain name marketers are even more upset. Why pay a lot of money for a seemingly-great url when it’s going to get morphed and truncated into a mini-url owned by a third party? Much of bit.ly’s success is due to the fact that for some reason it’s the default url for a Twitter dashboard called Tweetdeck. Tweetdeck is cool because it also lets you update your Facebook status at the same time.