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No, companies shouldn’t expect their employees to suddenly become torch-juggling jesters who do backflips as they bounce from meeting to meeting. But a certain amount of joie de vivre is necessary for productivity.

“Evaluate whether the people you are employing are loving what you are doing,” advocated Monica C. Smith, president and CEO of Marketsmith. “If not, they aren’t loving your brand, and it’s hard to help your brand if you don’t love it.”

But fun has to be paired with sound business practices. Now more so than ever, the means to determine what makes a customer buy are at marketers’ fingertips, through standardized metrics and report card systems, and it is incumbent upon them to take advantage of these, Smith said.

InfoUSA Services Group president Ed Mallin, who joined Smith on a keynote panel of direct marketing industry leaders, used his speaking time to bring a note of optimism to the direct marketing community’s future, contrasting his views with those of Tuesday keynote speaker Kevin Aronin (http://directmag.com/news/aronin-dmi-co-op-0501/).

“I’m not moving to Europe, and I’m not shredding my credit cards,” Mallin said, responding to Aronin’s views that the U.S. economy was temporarily tapped out, and the best opportunities for DMers involve using the Web to attract overseas customers. “We are going to get through this. We will come back and be as strong as we ever were. Things will be different, but we will be able to accomplish this.”

Mallin did agree with Aronin’s views of the Web’s ever-increasing importance. “The digital world shift is most dramatic shift in our lifetime, and it’s not going away,” he said. “This is an important business reality. Look at infoUSA – we’re investing millions in online acquisition and retention tools.”

One area where the tightening economic picture would have an impact on the DM community is in mergers and acquisition activity.“In 2008-2009, we’re going to see less of this,” Mallin said.

Does this trend include infoUSA, which during the past decade-plus has completed 47 acquisitions? Mallin acknowledged that the equity market was going to be more cautious, but that infoUSA would still pursue acquisitions that fit its strategic needs.

“Our [acquisition] philosophy is to expand market share, gain new clients, new talent and expertise, new technology and new verticals we haven’t been strong in before, and to be able to offer new products and services,” Mallin said.

So from where stems Mallin’s earlier expressed optimism? The online marketplace. Reflecting on the digital operations within Walter Karl and Edith Roman, two brands under his purview at infoUSa, Mallin noted that their business was up between 35%-40% from last year’s levels.

“There is opportunity,” he said. “Mail [volume] is down, marketers are being more cautious regarding their acquisition tests, and merge-purge activity is down. But there is room for good news. If we spend a lot of time wringing our hands [over the current failings of the economy], we will not get where we need to be.”

To mine for new revenue streams, Mallin is investigating new ideas for client/vendor relationships. A Tuesday session at the DMI Co-op sparked an idea he plans to propose to infoUSA. Under this new plan. InfoUSA would place its sales executives at client companies in a form of a shadow program. These executives would immerse themselves in the clients’ various divisions and business units, looking for additional ways infoUSA could work with the firms.

“They would then come back and give [the client’s management] solutions,” Mallin said. “And if they don’t, we should get someone else to work with you.”

The forum’s third panelist, Cosmetique CMO Darrell Edwards, reiterated the themes of the first two speakers. Yes, passion for what marketers do is essential, he said. “If you don’t have it, failure is around every corner.”

Yet at the same time, consumers need to mind their key business metrics. Too often marketers calculate lifetime value, apply it to their customer base – and then don’t recalibrate it.

“If your company was just been bought by a venture capital firm, or postage rates go up, [your customers’] lifetime value is about to change,” Edwards said. It’s a good measure of how much an organization should invest in business in order to be there in the future, he added, but calculations will change, especially in down times.

The people we are trying to market to put gas in their cars, food on tables, or keep homes – first,” Edwards said.

Even without down times, the Internet has radically changed some business models. When Cosmetique first started, it was a continuity club for makeup. But as the consumer has increasingly demanded control of what is purchased, and when that purchase is made, that model has proven less viable.

Only 20% of people are staying in the club, Edwards said. The continuity club model works if a marketer is selling a product unavailable anywhere else, but if that’s not the case, “the world is your marketplace and the world is your competition,” he said.

Smith, Mallin and Edwards spoke at a panel headlining the 34^th Annual Direct Media Client Conference & Co-op.