Advertising v3.0 by Chris Schaumann

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'.