Wired : The Buddy System

A revolution in the science of social networks began with a stash of old papers found in a storeroom in Framingham, Massachusetts. They were the personal records of 5,124 male and female subjects from the Framingham Heart Study. Christakis and Fowler realized that this obsolete list of references could be transformed into a detailed map of human relationships.

Here some of the highlight findings:

• Having an obese spouse raised the risk of becoming obese by 37 percent. If a friend became obese, the risk skyrocketed by 171 percent
• On Facebook, the average user has approximately 110 "friends"
• When smokers quit, their friends were 36 percent more likely to follow suit
• Each happy friend increased an individual's probability of being happy by 9 percent. An extra $5,000 in income raised it only 2 percent
• Each student had 6.6 close friends in their online network
• We end up staying in touch with more acquaintances. But that doesn't mean we have more friends
• The impact of networks disappears abruptly after three degrees of separation
• People, in other words, need people: We are the glue holding ourselves together

Their Book: : 'Connected - The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives'

What makes us human -- for good and bad -- is our social nature. Nowhere is this complex, wonderful, and sometimes dark part of us more clearly revealed than in Connected.

In a social world exploding with new ways to interact, Connected is a user's guide for ourselves in the 21st century.

 View the electronic version of 'Article'.

Eyeblaster – Global Benchmark Report

Eyeblaster just released the 2009 Global Benchmarks Insights and Analysis report. Some of the findings are:

• Results were surprising—while the CTR performance of Standard Banners tends to improve as unit size increases, in Rich Media, size is a poor predictor of performance. In Rich Media, size is only one component of banner visibility on the site.
  
• The analysis indicates that better predictors of performance in Rich Media are creative features such as video, ad format, flash features and expansions. Therefore, to improve performance, advertisers should focus on enhancing ads with video and other features, rather than increasing unit size.
  
  
  
• A study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) found that larger ad units are 25% more effective in lifting key brand metrics such as brand awareness and message association, even after one exposure. The research also shows that additional exposures significantly increased persuasion metrics such as purchase intent.

 View the electronic version of 'Global Benchmark Report 2009'.

Pew Research Center

The internet, which emerged this year as a leading source for campaign news, has now surpassed all other media except television as an outlet for national and international news.
Currently, 40% say they get most of their news about national and international issues from the internet, up from just 24% in September 2007. For the first time in a Pew survey, more people say they rely mostly on the internet for news than cite newspapers (35%). Television continues to be cited most frequently as a main source for national and international news, at 70%.

Information Is Beautiful

Jeffbullas’s Blog

The study on online activity titled the “Internet Activity Index” released by  the Online Publishers Association shows the  trends of the types of activity that have ocurred on the Internet over the past 6 years. The study’s findings has important implications for online marketers and how they should be focusing their time, resources and strategies in 2009 and beyond.

5 Key findings of the study

1. Internet users continue to spend a majority of their “time” with Content sites, up from 34 percent of total time spent in 2003 to 42 percent in 2009, a 24 percent increase
2. Emergence of Community (it wasn’t measured in 2003 as it wasn’t statistically significant enough and not on the radar)
3. Content is still king; the content rich sites continue to be a place where consumers spend the majority of their online time and provide an environment for brand marketers to reach and engage with consumers despite the emergence of community sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace
4. Community sites are reducing the share of online time by communications sites due to community sites ability to offer the same activities such as email and instant messaging more efficiently
5. Time spent with Search doubled

While some of these categories share common elements – for instance, there are strong community aspects to many News, Sports and other content sites -- it has become clear that each of these areas has very distinct characteristics, leading to a natural and healthy segmentation of the marketplace. By tracking share of time spent on each activity, the Index provides a benchmark for charting the relative impact of changing market dynamics on these segments as the medium matures.

  View the electronic version of 'Historical Internet Activity Index'.

The Singularity is Near

1. Ray Kurzweil: How technology's accelerating power will transform us (at TED January 12, 2007)

2. 'Building Gods', a film by Ken Gumbs

YouTube - Did You Know 4.0

b1 blog

Over the last couple of weeks, B1 has been working to produce an at-a-glance map outlining some of the main options B2B marketers face in using social media to engage their audiences.

 View the electronic version of 'B2B Social Media Marketing Map'.

Socialnomics  

Study Measures the Chatter of the News Cycle - NYTimes.com

For the most part, the traditional news outlets lead and the blogs follow, typically by 2.5 hours, according to a new computer analysis of news articles and commentary on the Web during the last three months of the 2008 presidential campaign. Picturing the News Cycle The finding was one of several in a study that Internet experts say is the first time the Web has been used to track — and try to measure — the news cycle, the process by which information becomes news, competes for attention and fades.

While most news flowed from the traditional media to the blogs, the study found that 3.5 percent of story lines originated in the blogs and later made their way to traditional media.
The study shows how Web-scale analytics can serve as powerful sociological laboratories.

Social media, especially the rapidly rising Twitter, as an informal but highly influential news recommendation and distribution network. “Even from last fall to today, the dynamics of the news cycle are very different, because of Twitter."

MemeTracker builds maps of the daily news cycle by analyzing around 900,000 news stories and blog posts per day from 1 million online sources, ranging from mass media to personal blogs.

  View the electronic version of 'Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle'.

Daily SEO blog

If you’ve been wondering how effectively have you been communicating with your followers, here are nine great tools that will help you find out your reach, communication effectiveness, popularity and analyze your twitter usage statistics:

1. Find out whom you Re-Tweet most / active hours etc: TweetStats
2. Find out your Reader Outreach Power: Twitter Analyzer
   
3. Find out which Tweet gained you followers and which made you lose them: Tweet Effect
4. Find your Social Capital, Velocity and Centralization on Twitter: Reach, Velocity and Social Capital. Twinfluence
   
5. Find out who’s the popular Twitter user in your country/ region: Twitter Grader
6. Find out your average Twitter usage over a period of time: Tweet Rush
7. Find out your Twitter Rank: Twitter Rank
8. Find out how many people you reached via your tweets: Tweet Reach
9. Find your influence, signal-noise ratio and velocity: Twitlyzer
   

   

Research - Eyeblaster

Eyeblaster used isolated data from a sample size of 42 billion rich media impressions spanning across all formats and global regions, analyzing Dwell Time, a metric that measures engagement as the average time consumers intentionally spend with online ads.

Recent years saw click thru rates (CTR) dropping from 5% to way below 0.4% (or 0.1% for standard banners). This has led some to conclude that ‘display advertising is dying’. On the other hand, data such as Comscore and OPA’s recent research showed that consumers exposed to display ads spend over 50% more time on an advertiser’s site the following month, viewing over 50% more pages than average visitors. This may lead to the conclusion that display advertising is more critical than ever. Human attention has become a scarce commodity.

The main findings in this research include the following:

• Consumers are 25 times more likely to spend meaningful time on the ad than click it
• When they do spend time, consumers spend close to a full minute of active engagement
• Video increases Dwell Rate by 30% and Dwell Time by 200% (in the US) or 100% (globally)
• Consumers react to ads differently depending on the time of day, week, or year
• Home-page media offers one of the highest Dwell Rates, but lowest Dwell Time

 View the electronic version of 'Trends of Time and Attention in Online Advertising'.

Economics of 'Free': 'Maybe Media Will Be a Hobby Rather than a Job' - SPIEGEL

In a SPIEGEL interview, Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of US technology and culture magazine Wired discusses the Internet's challenge to the traditional press, new business models on the Web and why he would rather read Twitter than a daily newspaper.

• I don't use the word media. I don't use the word news. I don't think that those words mean anything anymore. They defined publishing in the 20th century. Today, they are a barrier.
• More and more people are choosing social filters for their news rather than professional filters. We're tuning out television news, we're tuning out newspapers.
• The problem is not that the traditional way of writing articles isn't valuable anymore. The problem is that this is now in the minority.
• The problem is not that there isn't money to be made online, it's just that our costs are too high.
• Advertisers spend $22 to reach 1,000 people on wired.com -- and $100 at the magazine. I don't think we have discovered the perfect online advertising vehicle yet.
• It's all about attention. That is the most valuable commodity. If you have attention and reputation, you can figure out how to monetize it. However, money is not the No. 1 factor anymore.
• Free is the force of gravity.
• What is left for mass media -- it's the kind of stuff that niches don't do well. Politics, war, disaster, scandals, etcetera. You can't charge for it and advertisers don't like it.

Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey

Global - The most trusted forms of advertising globally are personal recommendations and online opinions, with text ads on mobile phones the least trusted, according to a new survey by Nielsen. The Global Online Consumer Survey found that nine in every 10 internet consumers trust recommendations from people they know, while seven in every 10 trust consumer opinions online.

Interestingly, the next most trusted form of advertising was brand websites (70%), followed by editorial content from media (69%), brand sponsorships (63%) and TV ads (61%). The least trusted forms of advertising globally were mobile text ads (24%), followed by online banner ads (33%), online video ads (37%) and ads served in search engine results (41%).

"The explosion in consumer generated media over the last couple of years means consumers' reliance on word of mouth in the decision-making process, either from people they know or online consumers they don't, has increased significantly," Rebecca Tan, executive director, media group, The Nielsen Company Singapore, said in a statement.

"However, we see that all forms of advertiser-led advertising, except ads in newspapers, have also experienced increases in levels of trust and it's possible that the CGM revolution has forced advertisers to use a more realistic form of messaging that is grounded in the experience of consumers rather than the lofty ideals of the advertisers."

Chart of the Day - Online Ad Rates

Online display ad prices haven't fully recovered to last year's peak, but according to one source, they're getting there.
At the end of June, ad rates among the 6,000 Web publishers working with ad-optimizing firm PubMatic were up 35% since a low point at the beginning of the year. Rates climbed 15% between May and June.“Although ad pricing has not returned to year-ago levels, the industry has gone up consistently every month since January 2009.

Business Magazines Head For The Abyss

At the same time, the big business magazines are tanking along with the economy.  McGraw-Hill is trying to dump BusinessWeek while it still can. Earlier, Condé Nast pulled the plug on Portfolio. And Forbes has shed a large portion of its staff this year.

In Q2, magazine ad revenue dropped an average 22% year-over-year, according to the Magazine Publishers of America. The big business mags had it even worse: BusinessWeek was down 30%, Forbes down 35%, and Fortune down 43%. Even the Economist, which has outperformed its peers in recent years, was down 20%. (Subscription revenue and online revenue -- the lone source of growth for many publications -- is not included in these tallies.)

Study by Altimeter Group and Wetpaint

What big brands do the best job with social media? A new study by analyst Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group and Wetpaint ranks the top 100 brands by social media engagement. You can find the report embedded below.

The study scores the engagement level of each of the top 100 brands across more than ten social media channels, including blogs, Facebook, Twitter, wikis, and discussion forums. Starbucks scored the highest, with 127 points. The top ten brands are:

1. Starbucks (127)
2. Dell (123)
3. eBay (115)
4. Google (105)
5. Microsoft (103)
6. Thomson Reuters (101)
7. Nike (100)
8. Amazon (88)
9. SAP (86)
10. Tie – Yahoo!/Intel (85)

 View the electronic version of 'ENGAGEMENTdb'.

Microsoft Research TechFest 2009 Virtual Event Room

In existing online-advertisement platforms, the relevance between advertisers and users is decided largely by advanced keyword matching. Typically, in a pay-per-click model, advertisers specify the words that should trigger their ads and the maximum amount they are willing to pay per click. When a user enters a search query, browses a Web page, or interacts with text, the advertisement platform will select and show relevant ads based on the text content in the query or the page. Though other context, such as location, time, and user profile, can be taken into consideration, text understanding remains the main technology.

We will present an image-centric advertisement platform in which advertisers bid on images instead of keywords. For example, a toy seller could bid on the image of a related movie poster, while a restaurant could bid on the image of a cooking-magazine cover. Users would receive ads based on the content of images they recently browsed or used. Components of this platform include an advertisement editorial tool and image-content-understanding, imagematching, and user-understanding.

 Download the electronic version of 'Research Gallery Project Details'.

By Brian Solis and JESS3

The colour of money - Change Agent (by Synovate)

Research conducted by CCICOLOR $the Institute for Color Research$ has revealed that people make a subconscious judgement about a person, environment, or product within 90 seconds of introduction, and that up to 90% of that assessment is based on colour alone.

The retinas in our eyes have three types of cone-shaped colour receptors, which can only detect red, blue, and green, the additive primaries. But our incredibly clever brains can mix and match these three colours, creating 7,000,000 visible shades and tints.

Some of which appeal to us more than others. The theory is that each colour evokes an emotional response in humans, and the level of emotion detected in that response describes the respondent’s personality.

• “Even if a person tries to be angry or aggressive in the presence of pink, he can’t,”
• Consider appealing to a colour specialist before painting your office wall yellow – it’s the most visually fatiguing colour, and can decrease the productivity
• Cars are now a technological purchase as much as an automotive one. As such, we’re unconsciously drawn to the greyer end of the spectrum (i.e. silver)
• Colour increases brand recognition by up to 80%
• Blue is an appetite suppressant & traditionally a signal that a food is poisonous
• Lemon yellow is also said to make people look much younger
• Red, a colour that stimulates and provokes rushes of adrenalin

Colours are used in supermarkets, to invoke our emotions into spending more money red is used because it stands out above all other colours, also it causes our adrenaline to start and makes heart beat faster. Blue is used as a trust symbol blue invokes trust, green makes us think of fresh.

Asian Publishing Convention

The Consumer is control and ignores standard Advertising. He spends most of his time online and the online populations in Asia are exploding. Advertisers are trying to keep up and struggling with finding the right way to reach and engage them in a meaningful manner.
Measuring this engagement is another challenge. The presentation highlights key consumer trends, their online behavior and illustrate a way forward.

Presented at the APC on 17.07.09 in Manila, Philippines by Chris Schaumann: