Booz & Co and Buddy Media’s recent study on the state of social media and marketing offer some interesting insights into what companies are doing now – and where they plan to invest in the future. For instance: Social media is primarily the domain of marketing.  Less than half (48%) of companies have PR leading [...]

To be successful in social media you need to listen, learn and respond. Some companies are not even listening: In Europe just under a third of companies have implemented monitoring and analysis of the social media conversations. (Social Media Governance 2011)  In the US 55 percent use search alerts , but  only 16 percent are [...]

OutBrain recently released an update to their  Content Discovery and Engagement Report. The original study was done in Q1 and the update is for Q2. Top 20 Traffic Sources to Content Pages 1 Google 2 Yahoo 3 AOL/Huffington Post 4 Facebook 5 MSN* 6 Drudge Report 7 CNN 8 Outbrain 9 StumbleUpon 10 Twitter 11 [...]

A UC Berkeley study looked into who is creating most of the content online and they found that even though we have a plethora of easy publishing tools things have not changed  that much:  just 10 percent of us are creating and posting content.  And moreover, the better educated you are,  the more likely you [...]

In an earlier post I posted some research about how companies are struggling to measure social media ROI. Wave 2 of The Faces of Social MediaSM from Knowledge Networks might provide a clue: Purchase decisions of 38 million 13 to 80 year-olds in the U.S. are now influenced in various ways by social media — [...]

47% of firms surveyed globally use social media to find new business,  an increase of 7% from last year. (Source Regus survey via The Street) China and India lead the pack: 65% of Chinese firms (vs. 44% last year) and 61% of Indian companies (vs. 52%) successfully use social media to acquire customers. Next are [...]

In a recent Pew Research report about how people get their news today, sharing was highlighted as one of the integral activities associated with news content online. “If searching for news was the most important development of the last decade, sharing news may be among the most important of the next.” Share This just released [...]

For years we’ve been told that email is still far and away the best way to reach our audiences, but a new study from Pitney Bowes  released in April  shows that social media is nipping hard on the heels of the number one position. Rated for cost effectiveness and ease of use, social media is [...]

Our recent study of the top companies across several categories revealed that on average just over 80% are using some form of social media. Yet another study shows that most have not figured out how to calculate a return on that investment. According to a Hypatia Research report, “Benchmarking Social Community Platform Investments & ROI,” [...]

A UK-based survey revealed that while 90 percent of journalists are embracing social media tools, half of them feel that PR pros don’t PR people lack understanding of the need to build genuine relationships on social media and don’t provide resources that help them  with their  requests and queries, say the UK journos. The PR [...]