For marketers, the 2009 holiday shopping season marks a return to basics, an Ann Arbor-based online retail executive says.

The treacherous economy demands a focus on essentials, ForeSee Results vice president of retail strategy Kevin Ertell told eMarketer.com:

Retailers will focus on proven marketing techniques like paid search and e-mail marketing and shed all the peripheral stuff. By peripheral stuff he means experimental activities on social media sites. A lot of retailers talk about Facebook and Twitter, Ertell says, but those forays still seem to be marginal tactics for now.

That contrasts with conventional wisdom in the marketing community, which is widely embracing nontraditional marketing strategies.

Reuters reported that social media marketing spending in the U.S. would total $716 million in 2009. The report also states that some 47.1 percent of online retailers surveyed by Shop.org "plan to increase the use of social media this holiday."

Read eMarketer.com's story here.

Contact AnnArbor.com.'s Nathan Bomey at nathanbomey@annarbor.com or (734) 623-2587. You can also follow him on Twitter.