Social Media Training Events – Locations & Dates

Hi everyone, just wanted to advise you of the next round of social media training events, if you are interested in attending any of the events and days listed below, please contact the event organiser on the email address listed.

Social Media for Senior Management will feature on day 3 presented by Mike Andrew.

 

3 Day MBA for Marketing Professionals

2-4 August 2010
Venue: Park Royal Hotel,Kuala Lumpur

 

3 Day MBA for Marketing Professionals

4-6 August 2010
Venue: Swissotel Merchant Court, Singapore

 

3 Day MBA for Marketing Professionals

19-21 September 2010
Venue: Crowne Plaza Hotel,Dubai

 

For bookings and/or enquiries about costs and to request a brochure, please visit 3 Day MBA for Marketing Professionals bookings and enquiries

Privacy Concerns Fail to Slow Social Activity

Users fear ads more than identity theft

Facebook, which stirred consumer privacy worries in spring 2010 with its rollout of new opt-out initiatives, has not experienced an exodus of users, leaving many industry watchdogs wondering whether web users really do care about online security.

According to a May 2010 study by privacy researcher the Ponemon Institute sponsored by identity theft prevention service ProtectMyID.com, more than three-quarters of US social media users have at least some concern about their privacy and security while using social media, including 28% who say their concerns are serious.

About a quarter of social media users are worried about identity theft on the sites, according to the study, compared with 54% who thought their information might be stolen while banking online and 42% while shopping online. When asked about the consequences they attribute to their own use of nonsecure social sites, the greatest number of respondents cited an increase in the frequency of online ads they see.

That topped the number of people who had had secrets revealed or downloaded viruses, and outpaced by far the number who had had their identity stolen.

While three-quarters of social media users said their security was either important or very important to them, almost half admitted they used social sites that they didn’t trust. Further, only 35% said they chose high security settings for their social media profiles.

And many were still willing to share large amounts of information that, in combination, could potentially be identifying.

Even users who had experienced identity theft in the past did not differ significantly in their practices from the typical social media user.

With just 39% of social media users confident that social networks will protect their privacy, marketers must be careful to avoid any appearance of impropriety. Research suggests users will continue to flock to sites like Facebook and offer them access to large amounts of personal data but will attribute unwanted ads to possible security issues.

Email is Permanent Consumer Fixture

Email is a permanent fixture in the lives of global consumers, according to [pdf] a new report from digital marketing firm e-Dialog.

Email Ownership Approaches 100%
Of the nearly 13,000 consumers e-Dialog surveyed around the world for its “Global Perspectives” report, 96% of them have a personal email account. Of the 13 countries surveyed, consumers in South Korea reported the highest percentage of having a personal email account at 99%.US adoption is at 97%. The lowest reported percentage is Italy at 87%.

High email adoption is also driving consumers to use messages that are connected to their primary email account, including social email and mobile email. Although usage of these types of email is much lower (37% and 34% overall, respectively), they are still potentially valuable marketing tools.

Usage of these two email types has strong regional variation. For example, 56% of US consumers own a social networking email account, but only 24% of Asia-Pacific consumers own one.

8 in 10 Consumers Want New Product Info via Email
The vast majority of consumers across global regions clearly indicate that they prefer to get new product marketing information via email. Overall, 80% of consumers surveyed indicate this preference, with 84% of Asia-Pacific consumers indicating such a preference followed by American (78%) and European (75%) consumers.

Broken down by nation, interest in product marketing offers via email is highest in Japan and Singapore (88%) and Italy and China (84%), and lowest in Sweden (54%). e-Dialog analysts advise that interest doesn’t always equal action, underscoring the need for marketers to employ relevance empowering techniques including segmentation and testing to drive profitable subscriber behavior.

Subscriber Acquisition Preference Varies by Nation

While websites are generally the preferred place for consumers to opt-in, marketers must adjust acquisition strategies by these regional differences, according to e-Dialog findings:

• Company website registration: This behavior is highest in Spain (60%), Italy (58%) the US (57%), the UK (53%) and Singapore (50%). Consumers in France and the Netherlands are less likely to opt-in via the website and prefer to do so through a catalog order.
• SMS acquisition: The ability for a consumer to quickly text their email address to an SMS code in order to opt-in online is most prevalent in the Asia-Pacific region. While other acquisition behavior in Asia-Pacific is similar to the overall global results, it differs dramatically for SMS opt-in. Twenty-one percent of Asia-Pacific consumers have reportedly opted in to email in this manner, as compared to 13% of the overall global survey respondents. This behavior is highest in China (27%).
• Social acquisition: This emerging acquisition tactic is more popular with US consumers (12%) than it is with their European peers (8%). But again it is the Asia-Pacific region where it is most prevalent. Consumers in China (27%) and Singapore (17%) are especially likely to be acquired through a social network.

More US Consumers Use Email than SocNets for Brand Interaction
More US online consumers use email than social networks for brand interaction, according to a new study from digital marketing firms ExactTarget and CoTweet. Data from the “Daily Morning” report indicates that 93% of online consumers aged 15 and older receive at least one permission-based email per day, putting them into the category of “subscribers.”

Broken down by age demographic, 15-to-17-year-olds are subscribers at a significantly lower rate (68%). All other age brackets of online consumers aged 18 and older are subscribers at rates between 93% and 96%. In contrast, 38% of online consumers are fans of at least one company or brand on Facebook, placing them in the “fans” category, while only 5% follow a brand on Twitter.

US Mobile Navigation On the Rise

The US mobile map audience grew 44% between April 2009 and April 2010, according to new comScore MobiLens data.

33.5M Access Mobile Maps
For the three-month period ending April 2010, 33.5 million mobile users accessed maps at least once during a month, an increase of 44% from the previous year. Visitors accessing maps one to three times per month increased 47% to 17.1 million users, while those accessing once a week increased 60% to 11.6 million users. The most frequent users, those accessing maps on a near-daily basis, climbed 9% to reach 4.8 million users.

Smartphone, App Usage Drives Mobile Map Growth
For the three-month period ending April 2010, 26% of smartphone users accessed maps via applications, while 19% accessed maps via browser in a month. In comparison, just 2% of feature phone users accessed maps via applications, with 4% doing so via browser.

Smartphone users drove growth in both application and browser map usage, with app access nearly tripling to 12.7 million smartphone users, while browser map access surged 93% to nearly 9 million smartphone users. The number of mobile map app users first surpassed mobile map browser users in February 2010.

Drivers Use Mobile Maps
Among those who accessed maps on their mobile devices, 87.2% did so from a car or other vehicle, with 17.2% doing so while walking, running or biking, and 16.7% while using public transit. The most utilized types of maps were graphical maps with turn-by-turn directions (60.3% of mobile maps users), followed by 50.6% using a graphical map without turn-by-turn directions and 46.8% using turn-by-turn directions without a graphical map.

European Mobile Mapping Grows 68%
Mobile mapping is also on the rise in Europe this year, with the rate of mobile mapping growing 68% between February 2009 and February 2010, according to previous comScore MobiLens data. In total, there were an average of 21.1 million users of mobile mapping and directional services in the EU5 nations of the UK, Germany, Spain, France and Italy in the three months leading to February 2010. This was a 68% increase from an average of 12.5 million EU5 mobile mapping and directional services users in the three months leading to February 2009.

Among those who accessed maps via their mobile devices for the three-month period ending February 2010, most (68.2%) accessed those services in a car or other vehicle.

5 Factors Push Email Past SocNets

Five key factors make email a more popular means of brand interaction than social networks, according to [pdf] a new study from digital marketing firms ExactTarget and CoTweet.

Familiarity
Because email isn’t new, consumers are familiar with the technology, are comfortable using it, and know exactly what to expect, according to “Email X-Factors.” Consumers have also grown accustomed to using email as a way of engaging with brands, making it top-of-mind when it comes to interacting with a company. Consumers most frequently use email for two types of brand interaction: obtaining promotions and deals and customer communications.

1. Obtaining Promotions and Deals. The internet has simplified price and promotion shopping, and 82% of consumers will search a variety of online channels to obtain deals and promotions. For the majority of consumers, they begin their search by checking a particular brand’s corporate website. Seventy-six percent of consumers will initially seek deals and promotions on a brand’s website, and from there, 62% will sign up to receive email, while 54% will use a search engine.

Meanwhile, 17% of consumers will also include Facebook as part of their search for ongoing deals, and 3% will search for deals on Twitter.
Women are more likely than men to sign up for emails (67% compared to 57%), and older consumers are also more likely to sign up for emails to get ongoing deals.

However, the difference based on age is far less than may be expected. In fact, Millennials (aged 15-24) are twice as likely to subscribe to email in their search for ongoing deals (56%) as they are to search for deals on Facebook (28%).

2. Customer Communications. The internet has also changed how organizations approach customer service. In the age of immediate gratification, the importance of customer service has been magnified. And although social media has given customers a way to publicly air their grievances against a brand, the majority of customers still prefer to deal with customer service issues in private—over the phone, through a company’s website, or through email. When faced with a customer service issue, 41% of customers will communicate via phone, 33% via company websites, and 20% via email. 37% of customers will send an email after an unsuccessful first attempt, making it the most common second step in the process of dealing with a customer service issue.

Consumers often turn to email for customer service requests because an immediate response is not always necessary. Email is seen as an efficient way of dealing with issues without having to wait on the phone for help, or turn to social media where privacy is lost.

Manageability
More than nine in 10 (93%) of U.S. online consumers are subscribers, meaning they receive at least one permission-based commercial email message on a typical day. The average consumer receives 44 daily emails (including commercial and personal), and half of consumers receive fewer than 25 per day. While these numbers aren’t small, most consumers consider the size of their inboxes manageable. So while marketers may be overwhelmed by overflowing inboxes, most of their customers aren’t.

Of those 44 daily emails, about 25% are permission-based commercial messages, with the remaining 75% comprised of personal messages, transactional messages, and spam that’s quickly deleted.

The average teen (aged 15-17) receives less than half the email of the average consumer, and receives only four commercial emails per day. And while marketers often interpret these statistics to mean a large generational shift away from email is occuring, ExactTarget analysis indicates this is a misinterpretation. The amount of email teens receive increases significantly when they graduate from high school, suggesting life stage—not age—is a more important factor when considering how much consumers rely on email.

However, ExactTarget advises email marketers to focus on only sending relevant emails to consumers, as a recent CMO Council study indicates 41% of US internet users threatened to stop buying from brands that sent irrelevant emails. (For more details see “Relevancy” below.)

Trust and Privacy
Consumers have two major concerns regarding trust and privacy of promotional emails: whether personal data will be shared and the ease of unsubscribing. ExactTarget advises that established brands have a distinct advantage when it comes to earning the trust of their consumers. Consumers tend to give the benefit of the doubt to big brands, and assume their email addresses will be safe, secure, and unshared.

In contrast, consumers will do additional research on unknown brands before offering their email addresses. They will Google company names, and review complaint history and comments on Facebook and Twitter.

Relevancy
Consumers know it’s possible for companies to send targeted and personalized messages, meaning relevancy is no longer an option for marketers. And when it comes to email, consumers quickly decide which companies they like to receive messages from, opposed those they don’t, based on whether the email message is relevent or not. ExactTarget research found that half (49%) of consumers “always” open emails from their “favorite” companies, compared to only 16% who say they never open email.

Exclusivity
While only one-third of consumers said they were motivated by the promise of exclusive content when choosing to become a subscriber, email’s exclusivity factor extends beyond content. ExactTarget advises that becoming a subscriber is like becoming a member of an exclusive club. As mentioned earlier, subscribers demonstrate their trust in a brand when they provide a company with their email address. And in return, they expect to be a part of an exclusive club.

More Consumers Use Email than SocNets for Brand Interaction
More online consumers use email than social networks for brand interaction, according to another recent study from ExactTarget and CoTweet. Data from the “Daily Morning” report indicates that 93% of online consumers aged 15 and older receive at least one permission-based email per day, putting them into the category of“subscribers. Broken down by age demographic, 15-to-17-year-olds are subscribers at a significantly lower rate (68%). All other age brackets of online consumers aged 18 and older are subscribers at rates between 93% and 96%.

Meanwhile, 38% of consumers are fans of at least one brand on Facebook, while only 5% are followers of at least one company or brand on Twitter.

Lady Gaga Most Popular Musician Online

Contemporary pop singer Lady Gaga is currently the most popular musician online, based on her global social media following, according to data from Famecount.

SocNet Users Gaga for Lady
Lady Gaga has a global following of 8.9 million Facebook fans, 4.6 million Twitter followers, and 307,410 YouTube subscribers. This has catapulted her to become the most followed global social media entity across any genre, including consumer brands. This month, Lady Gaga surpassed President Barack Obama as the most popular celebrity in any genre online.

Twitter Helps Spears, Facebook Helps Jackson
Among music celebrities, Lady Gaga is followed in online popularity by Britney Spears, currently the world’s top Twitterer with more than 5.2 million followers. Country performer Taylor Swift is ranked third, followed by the only non-living musician to make it into the top 10, Michael Jackson. Jackson’s overall social media rating is due in large part to being the world’s most popular musician on Facebook with over 13.2 million fans.

Gaga, Bieber Lead Online Popularity Growth
Lady Gaga has also seen the fastest growth in social media popularity this month, adding 1.5 million Facebook fans, 483,130 Twitter followers and 19,213 YouTube subscribers. Although Canadian YouTube sensation, Justin Beiber is only ranked fifth in terms of overall online popularity for June 2010, he is running almost even with Gaga in popularity growth.

Other stars in the Top 10 growth chart this month include Eminem, whose seventh album Recovery has just been launched, and Shakira, who recently performed at the World Cup opening ceremony and whose World Cup song has already achieved more than 30 million YouTube views.

US Offline Music Preferences Differ
Although contemporary pop singer Celine Dion is the most popular musical performer among all US adults, country performers and classic performers who are deceased or no longer actively performing dominated a recent Harris Poll.

The top two performers among all US adults, Celine Dion and U2, are both currently active and not in the country genre. However, deceased singer Elvis Presley (who crossed multiple genres) and 1960s rock group The Beatles tied for the third spot. Country performer Tim McGraw was ranked number five. Lady Gaga came in at number six, and was the only performer to rank in both surveys.

Social Media Links Improve Email CTR

Including social media links in promotional emails improves their click-through rate (CTR), according to a recent study from email marketing technology firm GetResponse.

Social Media Links Improve CTR 30%
GetResponse research indicates that on average, promotional emails sent by small-to-mid-sized business (SMB) marketers that include links to at least one social network have a 9.4% CTR. Meanwhile, promotional emails without any social network links have a 7.2% CTR. This means promotional emails including social network links generate an average CTR 30% higher than promotional emails without the links.

The More, The Merrier
Results of the study show that email messages with no social network links return an average 7.2% CTR, while email messages with one social network link returned an average 8.7% CTR. This CTR jumps to 9.3% for messages with two social network links, a roughly 7% increase from messages with one link and 29% increase from messages with no links.

In addition, messages with three or more social sharing links generated an 11.2% CTR, which is 20% higher than messages with two links, 28% higher than messages with one link and 55% higher than messages with no links.

Twitter Offers Best CTR
Broken down by specific social network, Twitter offers the highest CTR (10.2%), followed by Facebook (9.1%). Digg offers the lowest CTR of major social networks (5.3%), meaning messages with Twitter links are almost twice as effective at generating CTR as messages with Digg links, but only 12% more effective than messages with Facebook links.

Most SMB Marketers Don’t Use Social Media in Email
Despite demonstrated improvements in CTR, only a distinct minority of small-to-mid-sized-business (SMB) marketers use social media links or icons in their promotional emails, according to other study results from GetResponse. Data indicates that 18.7% of SMB marketers linked promotional emails to messages on their Twitter accounts. Another 13.5% included clickable sharing links to social media networks.

5 Degrees of Twitter Separation

Almost all users on Twitter are within five steps of each other, according to recent data from social media consulting firm Sysomos.

Eight in 10 Twitter Users Within 5 Steps or Less
On average, Twitter users have five degrees of separation between each other - meaning nearly everyone within Twitter is only five steps away. Of all friendship distances, five steps is the most common (41%), while a friendship distance of four steps is the second-most common (37%). Much smaller percentages are three and two steps away, leading to a total of 85% of all users being within five steps of separation.

Of users beyond five steps away from each other, the most common distance is six steps (13%), with 2% being seven steps away.

Reachability Nears 100% Within 6 Steps
One way to measure the connectedness of Twitter is by looking at the percentage of Twitter users that can be touched by reaching out a certain distance. Using the Twitter network graph, Sysomos analysts determined that, on average, a Twitter user will encounter 83% of all other Twitter users by visiting everyone’s friends up to a distance of five steps.

If the user visits all friends of friends up to six steps, 96% of all Twitter users will be covered. This means, the Twitter network has good social connectivity, and that, in theory, a re-tweet does not have to propagate that much to reach a potentially large number of people.

Twitter is Highly Local
On average, it only takes 3.32 steps for a user to find someone who is following them (with a standard deviation of 1.25 friendship distances). This means, if a user traces their friends, and their friends and so on, in 3.32 steps on average they will discover a follower of their own. This means there are many small, circular connections on Twitter.

Celeb Twitter Followers Have Low Authority
Celebrities seem to have large amounts of followers with low Twitter authority levels (based on factors such as a user’s number of followers, following, updates and retweets), according to other recent Twitter-related data from Sysomos. Of five celebrities examined, the average follower of President Barack Obama had the highest authority rating on a scale of 0 to 10, 2.4. The most common authority score among Obama’s roughly 4.2 million followers is 1, held by 20%.

Celebrities seem to have large amounts of followers with low Twitter authority levels. This could be because they attract everyone from all walks of life. Some people may only be on Twitter to see what their favorite stars have to tweet about. In addition, most celebrity followers tracked by Sysomos had few followers themselves, pushing down their authority scores.

Celeb Twitter Followers Have Low Authority

While celebrities have high numbers of Twitter followers, those followers usually have minimal reach and influence, according to social media consulting firm Sysomos.

Celebrity Followers Offer More Quantity than Quality
Celebrities seem to have large amounts of followers with low Twitter authority levels (see “About the Data” for more information on how authority levels are determined). Of five celebrities examined, the average follower of President Barack Obama had the highest authority rating on a scale of 0 to 10, 2.4. The most common authority score among Obama’s roughly 4.2 million followers is 1, held by 20%.

Interestingly, the celebrity whose fans had the second-highest authority score of 2.1, pop singer Lady Gaga, had the second-lowest following of about 4.5 million. The most common authority score of followers of all celebrities except Obama was 0.

Actor Ashton Kutcher had the highest number of followers (about 5.1 million), and the third-highest average authority score (1.8). Pop singer Britney Spears had the lowest average follower authority score (1.3) and second-highest number of followers (about 4.8 million).

Celebrities seem to have large amounts of followers with low Twitter authority levels. This could be because they attract everyone from all walks of life. Some people may only be on Twitter to see what their favorite stars have to tweet about. In addition, most celebrity followers tracked by Sysomos had few followers themselves, pushing down their authority scores.

Social Media Heavyweight Followers Have Most Authority
Social media heavyweights, private citizens who have made a name for themselves on Twitter, had the fewest followers but the highest average authority scores for their followers. Following the pattern seen with celebrity tweeters, the social media heavyweight with the fewest followers, Jason Falls (27,195), had the highest average follower authority score (4.8).

Conversely, the two social media heavyweights with the most followers, Chris Brogan (139,693) and Jeremiah Owyang (64,775), tied for the lowest average follower authority score of 4. The most common authority score for all social media heavyweight followers was either 4 or 5.

Online Media Beats Traditional Media
On the whole, the five news/media sources tracked by Sysomos show more variety among their scores than the celebrities or social media heavyweights. However, online media sources attracted fewer followers with higher average authority scores than traditional media sources.

Online media source Read Write Web, with about 1 million followers, had an average follower authority score of 3, which was also its most common follower authority score (19%). This tied online media source Mashable in average authority score, most common authority score and percentage of followers with the most common authority score. Mashable has more followers with about 2 million.

Online media source Tech Crunch ties traditional media source Time.com with an average follower authority of 2.4 and most common follower authority score of 2, at virtually the same percentage. However, Time.com has significantly more total followers (2.1 million) than Tech Crunch (1.4 million).

Traditional media source New York Times has the highest total number of followers (about 2.5 million) and lowest average authority score (2.2). It also has by far the lowest most common authority score of 0 (22%). Not surprisingly, sources that specialize in social media attract users that are more active on Twitter.

Facebook Fans More Valuable Customers
While there is variation in the value of different types of Twitter followers, on the whole Facebook fans of a brand provide more value as customers than non-fans, according to a new study from digital consulting firm Syncapse Corp.

The average value a Facebook fan provides a brand is $136.38, but it can swing to $270.77 in the best case or go down to $0 in the worst. This value is based on Syncapse analysis of five factors per fan: product spending, brand loyalty, propensity to recommend, brand affinity and earned media value.

On average, a Facebook fan participates with a brand 10 times a year and will make one recommendation. Value can differ significantly by individual brand. For example, in the case of Coca- Cola, the best case for fan value reaches $316.78 but is $137.84 for an average fan. In the worse case scenario, a fan is worth $0.

One-Third of Twitter Users Talk Brands

Many social site users make good use of the voice that the medium provides them to talk about brands, products and services. An April 2010 study by ROI Research commissioned by Performics found that, at least once a week, 33% of active Twitter users share opinions about companies or products, while 32% make recommendations and 30% ask for them.

Marketers using social media have tried to foster this type of earned media and other brand interactions, but a comparison of the study results with previous research, from October 2009, shows little change in consumers’ brand-oriented behavior.

On Twitter, significant percentages of users who had connected with a brand would recommend, discuss or purchase from the company, but those numbers inched slightly downward over six months.

On Facebook, users had similarly static opinions on the usefulness of social media to connect with brands. A healthy percentage were interested, but the practice did not become more important between October 2009 and April 2010.

“Social networking has greatly contributed to the shift from strict consumerism to more lively, two-way participation between brands and everyday customers,” said Daina Middleton, CEO of Performics, in a statement. “It’s a groundswell of technology-enabled word-of-mouth, and many of the brands involved in these active discussions are effectively satisfying their fans.”

Other consumers are content on the sidelines, using social sites primarily to connect with friends and family. Word-of-mouth opportunities still exist to reach them through those connections, even if they are not talking about brands.

Google amps up its search with 'Caffeine'

(CNN) -- If you searched Google on Tuesday, you may have noticed that the information you're looking for is a bit "fresher" than it would have been on Monday.

That's because the world's most popular search engine has unveiled a new search method called "Caffeine," which claims to index new information 50 percent faster than Google's old search.

"Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for Web searches than our last index, and it's the largest collection of Web content we've offered," the company says in a news release on its official blog. "Whether it's a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before."

That doesn't mean Google has changed its search formula entirely, or that search results will pop onto your screen faster than before. Essentially it means that Google is able to find new content more quickly. So, for instance, a new Twitter update that, in the past, would be been missing from search results because Google hadn't found and indexed it yet, would be posted to Google search results more quickly with Caffeine.

Here's a promotional video from Google that explains how the search works.

The update -- which has been anticipated by tech and search-engine blogs -- comes as Google faces increasing competition from both traditional search engines and from online social networks with search-like functions.

Google is still the top search engine, with 64 percent of search queries, according to a report from the Web traffic monitor comScore, which cites April numbers. But that's down 1 percent compared to the previous month. Meanwhile, Microsoft's Bing search engine has been winning new fans, and, in general, increasing traffic. Microsoft and Yahoo! combined now make up about 30 percent of the search market, according to the report.

In terms of social networks, Twitter has become a go-to site for finding up-to-the-minute information. And Facebook in April debuted its "Like" functionality all over the Web. Some tech writers see that as a threat to Google, since Facebook is essentially trying to organize information on the internet according to the likes and dislikes of someone's friends.

Mashable, a social media blog that has a content partnership with CNN, says Google Caffeine is effective at making the Mountain View, California, company's search results more immediate: "This search is not only faster, but in some instances in our few tests, seems more capable of producing real-time results," Ben Parr wrote on the site last year when rumors of Caffeine were surfacing.

The Google search update is a sign that the company is feeling some heat from its competitor Bing, writes Charles Arthur at The Guardian.

"It's interesting to see that Google is focusing again on the element of its offering where it does lead the pack: search," he writes. "That's what made its [Google's] name, but it's clear that even if Microsoft's Bing hasn't (yet?) won the market share, it has got Google thinking about how it can improve what it does."

The blog The Next Web says the move is significant for the development of the real-time internet, and that it also "could provide a tremendous boast to not only Google's stock price, but also to its ad revenue."

To better understand how Caffeine works, it might help to think of Caffeine as a blog and the old Google as a newspaper. Where a newspaper collects content and then publishes it all at once, at the beginning of the day, a blog is constantly looking for new information and updating on the fly. This is sort of how Google Caffeine works. Rather than collecting big "batches" of Web pages to index for its search, Google is trying to publish more frequently as it goes.

"Every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second," Google says.

In a blog post, Google software engineer Carrie Grimes acknowledges that times are changing for search.

"Content on the Web is blossoming," she writes. "It's growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average Web page is richer and more complex.

"In addition, people's expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish."

Story by By John D. Sutter, CNN

How Consumers Interact with Brands on Social Networks

Consumers do want relationships

The social networking audience in the US has reached critical mass. eMarketer estimates that 57.5% of all US Internet users, or 127 million people, will use a social network at least once a month in 2010. By 2014, nearly two-thirds of Internet users will be on board.

Marketers have been chasing this audience for several years, but the question remains: Do consumers notice, or care?

“Those who still think that social network users are too busy engaging with friends to notice marketers must change their viewpoint,” said Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report “Brand Interactions on Social Networks.” “Brand interactions are real, valuable and growing. “

According to a February 2010 survey by Chadwick Martin Bailey, a market research firm, 33% of Facebook users have become fans of brands on the network.

Another survey, by Edison Research, found that 16% of social network users had friended brands there. And half (51%) had done so on Twitter.

Coupons remain a leading driver of brand interactions in social networks. Learning about sales and new products is also a strong motivator for people to interact with companies in social media. Beyond the tangibles, such as coupons, consumers do gain positive feelings about a brand as a result of their interactions.

Still, social networks are not seen as primary research sources when consumers are looking to buy. Although people are very inclined to take advice from friends and family about products they are interested in, they are not nearly as likely to seek out their social network friends when they are researching online.

According to a study by PowerReviews and the e-tailing group, only 3% of online buyers said they sought recommendations from social network friends first, compared with 57% who started with search engines.

“More than half of all Internet users now use social networks, and the percentage of social network users who talk about companies, either in organic conversations or on branded company pages, is growing,” said Ms. Williamson. “Consumers do pay attention and they do value positive interactions with companies.

“But while people trust their friends for advice and use social networks as part of their research process, social networks are long way from replacing search, if they ever will, as a source of information leading to a purchase.”

Among Teens, Texting Tops E-Mail, Facebook

Four times as many teens choose SMS over Facebook

While some e-mail marketers fear losing the attention of their audience to social media, research suggests that the strengths of both media can be combined, and that the bigger threat may be text messaging.

An ExactTarget survey of adults and teens on their favorite communication methods showed that was also true among the younger set. Asked to choose between e-mail and Facebook—their preferred social network—33% of respondents ages 15 to 17 picked e-mail and 31% Facebook. About one-quarter liked both equally.

When Facebook went head-to-head with text messaging, it performed even worse: 48% of teens would rather communicate via SMS, compared with just 12% who chose Facebook.

Texting also won out over e-mail. Among adults, however, a preference for e-mail was still strong.

Texting was the communication activity teens were most likely to report having increased over the past six months, according to the ExactTarget survey. There were also significant numbers of teens using Facebook, meeting in person and communicating via e-mail more, but most respondents held those activities steady.

Adults are doing more texting too: One-quarter of respondents ages 18 and up told ExactTarget they were upping their usage. Still, nearly one-third said they never texted, a far cry from the 13% of teens who said the same.

Enter the Owner of Copyright Material – The Princess’s of Social Media

I’ve been working in social media for a long time now and I write for about 10 different blogs every day and some times I republish articles that I believe will be of benefit or interest to those that read my blogs, just like lots of blog writers do every day, after all, isn’t social media built on the principle of sharing? I thought so until today.

I always adhere to the principles of acknowledging the writer or publisher and I always leave the links intact so as to give the original blog owner the backlink as well as the kudos of having their material syndicated. I am always flattered when a blog owner takes one of my articles and adds it to their blog, as long as they give me credit as the author and include a link back to my site.

Well that is what I did today, published an article with credit and links intact and low and behold I get an email telling me to remove the article as it is copyright material and I don’t have permission to post the article or any other on my site. By the way the “remove” was in the largest font possible, any bigger and would not have needed my glasses to see it.

My mistake here it seems was leaving the box marked pingback ticked.

The site in question, or maybe I shouldn’t tell you who it is for fear they may be a bit precious, is a site all about social media.

The point of this post is basically to advise you that if you are taking other bloggers material to check first to see if the story is copyright, I wonder if they participate in article marketing, mm, anyway make sure you have permission before you publish content.

I mean silly as it sounds, I should just take the post, rewrite it and republish it and we’d be fine, after all, it is a post that offers information that has been around for years.

Maybe that’s what I’ll do, rewrite the post, and call it “6 ways to constantly produce quality blog content” or maybe that is copyright to, I know, I’ll go one better, I’ll change it to “7 ways to constantly produce quality blog content”.

There you go Mike, I’ve just found ways to produce better blog content, and your site will be a constant fountain of ideas.

Mobile Shopping Doubles in 2010

Shopping, yes. Buying? Maybe

Mobile commerce has been slow to catch on. According to Multichannel Merchant, four in five multichannel retailers have no m-commerce presence. But while consumer usage of mobile shopping is still relatively low, it is increasing, prompting firms such as Coda Research Consultancy to predict a doubling of m-commerce revenues in the US this year, to $2.4 billion.

There has also been a doubling in usage of mobile shopping, according to PriceGrabber.com’s “Smartphone Shopping Behavior” survey. In April 2010, 35% of US Web-enabled mobile phone owners said they had participated in some form of mobile shopping in the past year, such as browsing or researching but not necessarily purchasing products. That was up from 17% who said the same in 2009. Still, only 13% actually made purchases via mobile, up from 10% last year.

Among all mobile users, there was a marked willingness to adopt more mobile shopping behaviors over the next two years, though a significant portion of the population indicated they would never be interested in such activities.

Consumers’ greater willingness to shop on the mobile channel rather than buy is supported by other research. Retrevo found in February 2010 that across all age groups Internet users were at least three times as likely to research or compare prices on their phones as they were to make a purchase.

In Q9 2009, four times as many Internet users surveyed by ATG said they researched or browsed via mobile at least weekly than bought.

Among the mobile buyers surveyed by PriceGrabber.com, the top purchases were of digital content for their phones and consumer electronics, with both categories increasing over last year.

PriceGrabber found some of the barriers to further mobile buying were inherent to the medium, with respondents complaining that mobile screens were too small and saying that they simply preferred using a PC because it was easier. About one-third of respondents also said the mobile buying process takes too long, and one-quarter indicated transactions were too difficult to complete.

Social Networking Ranks as Fastest-Growing Mobile Content Category

comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released a report on the fastest-growing mobile application and browser content categories based on data from its MobiLens service. The report found that social networking led as the top-gaining category for both application and browser access, confirming the surging popularity of this service on mobile devices. The study also found that accessing Bank Accounts was one of the fastest-gaining categories via both app and browser, as the convenience of mobile banking continues to appeal to a growing number of consumers.

“With mobile media consumption on the rise, the discussion of how consumers are accessing content -- whether it is via application, browser or both -- continues to be an important factor for companies looking to invest further in their mobile brands,” said Mark Donovan, comScore senior vice president of mobile. “Although application access is clearly on the rise, with several categories more than doubling their audience via this method, content consumption via browser continues to be the most popular method for Americans to access mobile media.”

Smartphone Users Post Triple-Digit Growth in App and Browser Access

In terms of penetration, 78 percent of smartphone users accessed their browser in April 2010, while 80 percent of smartphone users accessed applications. In comparison, just 19 percent of feature phone users accessed their browser, with 17 percent accessing applications. Although smartphone users are driving growth in browser (up 111 percent in the past year) and application (up 112 percent) access, feature phone users still make up nearly half of all users accessing mobile browsers and apps.

“Although growth in application usage on smartphones continues to grab the spotlight in the mobile market, the audience using their mobile browser remains larger and is growing just as quickly,” added Donovan. “Brands need to remember to take into consideration the user experience across both channels when building their mobile strategies.”

Social Networking App Audience More Than Triples in Past Year

In April 2010, 69.6 million mobile users accessed an application on their phone, an increase of 28 percent from the previous year. Several application categories experienced triple-digit growth in the past year, emphasizing the increasing popularity of this method as a form of mobile content access. Social Networking experienced the strongest growth in app access, increasing 240 percent to 14.5 million users. Accessing News apps followed, growing 124 percent to 9.3 million users, while Sports Information apps experienced a 113-percent surge to nearly 7.7 million users. Bank Accounts apps also more than doubled their audience, growing to nearly 5 million users in April.

More Americans Still Use their Browser versus Applications

Nearly 73 million mobile users accessed their browser in April, an increase of 31 percent from the previous year. Mirroring application category growth, Social Networking ranked as the fastest-growing category accessed via browser, growing 90 percent from the previous year to reach almost 30 million users, followed by Bank Accounts (69 percent to 13.2 million users). Online Retail sites also experienced a significant increase in audience usage via browser, increasing 47 percent to 7.3 million users, as Americans continued to show adoption of the mobile retail channel.

Donovan continued, “Social networking is by far the fastest-growing mobile activity right now. With 20 percent of mobile users now accessing social networking sites via their phone, we expect to see both application and browser usage continuing to drive future consumption of social media.”

B2B Spending on Social Media to Explode

Despite social media marketing’s sizable popularity, business-to-business (B2B) companies are still fairly new to the discipline. According to a November 2009 survey from Business.com, 73% of B2B respondents who were using social media had less than two years of social media marketing experience.

But now that social media has caught on in the sector, spending forecasts suggest that big increases are coming.

“B2B participation in social media marketing is steadily increasing, and marketers are beginning to see opportunities to generate quality leads and position themselves as thought leaders in their industries,” said eMarketer’s Evelyn Jung, author of the new report “B2B Social Media Marketing Heats Up.”

Outsell estimates that marketing on social networks will grow 43.3% in 2010. Forrester Research predicts that B2B firms will spend $54 million on social media marketing in 2014, up from just $11 million in 2009.

Paid advertising on social networks—banners, text ads and search advertising, as well as the more targeted advertising being deployed by Facebook and MySpace—is a small portion of B2B marketers’ social spending.

When companies budget for social media marketing in 2010 and beyond, a substantial portion of their expenses will go toward other initiatives, such as creating and maintaining a branded profile page, managing promotions or public relations outreach within a social network, and measuring the effect of a social network presence on brand health and sales.

In 2009, B2B marketers spent the largest portion of their social media budgets on customer communities, followed by podcasts and blogs. These tactics allow B2B marketers to share more relevant product or service information with their customers than they could with other social tools.

“B2B companies tend to have longer and more complicated messages to convey, and these longer-form tactics enable them to position themselves as thought leaders with their customers,” Ms. Jung said.

Does Social Media Make Taking Time Off Harder?

Summer is almost here, and that means vacation time for many employees. Or does it?

The US has the highest percentage of mobile workers in its workforce, according to February 2010 data from IDC, with 75.5% of the workforce, or 119.7 million people, expected to be mobile by 2013. And 79% of them plan on taking their work-related devices with them on vacation, according to the second annual “Mobile Messaging Study” from Osterman Research, commissioned by software maker Neverfail.

A growing number of employees are not leaving work behind, even on weekends, breaks and holidays, because of the struggling economy. Three in 10 workers polled by TNS for InterCall said they needed to stay connected to their work 24/7. Men were more likely to feel compelled to check in, as were employees in their 30s.

Summer is almost here, and that means vacation time for many US employees. Or does it?

The US has the highest percentage of mobile workers in its workforce, according to February 2010 data from IDC, with 75.5% of the workforce, or 119.7 million people, expected to be mobile by 2013. And 79% of them plan on taking their work-related devices with them on vacation, according to the second annual “Mobile Messaging Study” from Osterman Research, commissioned by software maker Neverfail.

A growing number of employees are not leaving work behind, even on weekends, breaks and holidays, because of the struggling economy. Three in 10 workers polled by TNS for InterCall said they needed to stay connected to their work 24/7. Men were more likely to feel compelled to check in, as were employees in their 30s.

But workers are still divided over the benefits social media adds to their productivity. Slightly more than half (52.3%) the employees surveyed by the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) agreed that social media helped them learn more in less time, to some extent. But only 37% said they got more work done.

No wonder so many employees feel the need to work on weekends.

Social media presents great opportunities for marketers trying to reach workers. However, it might be a good idea to vary marketing messages sent during the workweek and those presented to workers checking in on weekends.