Jobless claims are often used as the most reliable statistics to project the state of the economy. With a recession at our back, jobless claims falling is certainly a good thing. The rates dropped last week to 469,000 jobless individuals.

Some companies are still trimming payrolls to contain costs amid weak sales as the U.S. emerges from the worst recession since the 1930s. An unemployment rate that’s forecast to average 9.8 percent this year may restrain consumer spending, which accounts for about 70 percent of the economy.

“We are in this limbo state where it is not clear if job growth has started yet,” Ethan Harris, head of economics for North America at Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Research in New York, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “Many companies say they over-reacted and fired a lot of people, more than they needed to, with the news of the recession. So, we’re expecting broad-based re-hiring.”

This is good news for the economy, which depends upon higher employment numbers in order to recover.

It looks as if the New York Times has decided to go ahead with their plan to charge for web content. This strikes me as an unwise move–there are so many other websites with similar content that users can go to instead of paying for the NYTimes’ content. The move is indicative of the newspaper’s bad financial situation, they are looking for an additional source of revenue.

“A metered model is a good option for them because you can still bring casual readers in to the front page, but you can monetize the dedicated readers,” Barry L. Lucas, a Gabelli & Co. Inc. analyst. “They’ve needed to do this for a long time because they’ve been giving away their content.”

The Times tried fees for some opinion and editorial content in a service called Times Select in 2006-07. At its peak, Times Select claimed 200,000 paying customers and had $10 million in revenue.

So the news isn’t all bad for users who still want to read the New York Times for free–they will have access to some material. More on this story here.

Company Reviews And Testimonials – The Most Effective Marketing You Can Do

Think about this scenario: You’re wanting to go out to eat with your spouse, but can’t decide where to go. You’ve read the ads in the newspaper, and every place sounds about the same. Just then, your best friend calls up to tell you about the meal he just ate at Joe’s Diner. He tells you how the food was all homemade, how the service was top-notch, and how the price was lower than any place he’d eaten in the entire month.

Which restaurant do you think you’d try after that?

Word of mouth, reviews, and testimonials are among the least expensive and most powerful forms of advertising you can use to sell your goods or services. Why? Because people trust their friends and neighbors more than they trust the ads put out by companies. And, now that the economy is in the tank, people are going to be much more picky about who gets their business, which means that word of mouth advertising is going to be more important than ever.

When you read about someone who has had a good experience with a product or company, or when a trusted friend recommends something to you, you’re much more likely to believe it than if it comes from an ad written by a marketing copywriter.

If you want to boost customer confidence in your business, and bring more money into your coffers, there are several things you can do when it comes to testimonials and company reviews.

The first thing you can do is to include testimonials from satisfied customers in your marketing materials. This can be on your website, in your brochures, in your sales letters, and in any other marketing collateral you use. In addition to using actual testimonials from happy customers, you can use any positive reviews that have been written about your company or service by an independent party. If you don’t have testimonials, there’s nothing wrong with contacting some of your regular customers and asking them to briefly tell their experiences.

You can also contact local publications like magazines or newspapers about writing feature stories/reviews about your company. This is free advertising that people generally trust because it comes from an independent source.

Another important tool to use is called a case study. A case study is essentially an expanded testimonial. It details a particular problem that one of your clients had and how your company/product solved that problem. Case studies are powerful marketing tools because they illustrate an actual situation, with a real customer, and how your company helped. People who are considering doing business with your company will gain a lot of confidence from the case study, and case studies convince more people to do business than traditional ads do.

If you’re looking for smarter, more effective ways to spend your marketing dollars, then make good use of customer testimonials and company reviews. The rewards will be worth much more than the money spent.