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Jack Hird (@Jake_Hird), senior research analyst for Econsultancy, offers the following social media stats:

• Twitter has 175 million registered users; 95 million tweets per day; 4 million tweets per hour.
• LinkedIn registrants number more than 100 million
• Facebook population officially is more than a half-billion, but some unofficial counting has it at 640 million. At least 250 million users log in every 24 hours; 200 million access it through mobile devices. The average Facebook user creates 90 pieces of content each month.
• Flickr hosts more than 5 billion images; 3,000 images uploaded every minute.
• Wikipedia now has more than 17 million articles and 91,000 active contributors.
• YouTube video views number more than two billion every 24 hours; more than 24 hours of video are uploaded every minute.

Read this article in full.

Graham Charlton (@gcharlton) has assembled statistics about the mobile Internet:

• People use mobile search at home in the evening (81%) than any other time or places more frequently than anywhere else (81%), followed by at home on weekends (80%).
• 66% use mobile search while while watching TV, something which should get advertisers thinking, while 61% said they use it at work.
• 75% said mobile search makes their lives easier, 63% said access to mobile search has changed the way they gather information, and 32% said they use mobile search more than search engines on their computers.
• 84% use mobile search to look for information on local retailers, such as opening hours, address and contact details. 82% look for online retailers, 73% find a specific product or manufacturer website.
• Tying in with the crossover in TV viewing and mobile search, 71% learn more about a product or service having seen an ad, 68% use it to find the best price for a product.

Read this article in full.

Also see Social Media Today’s “Best Social Media Stats and Market Research of 2010 (So Far)” by Tom Pick (@TomPick).

Let Somersault help you create an integrated social media marketing strategy. And be sure to use daily our SomersaultNOW dashboard to remain current with the latest developments in social media marketing and digital publishing.

Ron Benrey (@ronbenrey), posting on the blog Fiction After 50, lays out a rational approach to the art of pricing ebooks.

At first, we couldn’t understand why someone willing to spend $18 for two movie tickets would recoil at spending 10 bucks on an ebook. After all, a movie is a one-time event, whereas an ebook can be read again and again (and, with some ereaders, lent to other people).

We then we thought some more...

1. We paid for our ebook readers (which makes an ebook more like renting a DVD than going to a first-run movie).

2. Even more important, we know that ebooks (unlike movies, library books, or paper-back books) are cheap to produce. We think it’s unfair for a publisher to charge the same price for an ebook as for a paper book.

All at once, the penny dropped (as the Brits say). We began to understand why customers might perceive three to four bucks as a fair price for an ebook. They are doing an instinctive cost analysis and realizing that an ebook selling at $2.99 and a trade paper book selling for $14.99 can net a publisher the same profits. (This is eerily close to the truth when you consider the cost of printing, transportation, distribution, warehousing, and returns.)

Simply put ... there’s no reason for a publisher to charge 15, 20, even 25 dollars for an ebook — other than a seriously overdeveloped profit motive.

Read the full post.

Do you agree with him?

You’ll also want to read his post “eBook ‘Tipping Points’”

This article in Book Business (@bookbusinessmag) highlights the online tools that are enabling publishers to spread the word about their books to more targeted audiences — sometimes, at a much lower cost — than traditional marketing methods.

Simon & Schuster recently launched a brand-new way to connect with its customers through Foursquare, the popular, location-based mobile social networking community.

Users who follow Simon & Schuster Foursquare receive information and tips culled from Simon & Schuster books and authors when they "check-in" at certain locations, be it their favorite diner in London, a resort in Arizona, or the Pyramids in Egypt. For example, they'll receive facts about historic landmarks, a dish their favorite chef enjoys at a restaurant, or a tidbit such as 21 elephants walked across the Brooklyn Bridge in 1884, proving its stability.

Read this article in full.

Somersault has identified more than 500 online services to leverage for successful social media marketing. Let us know how we can help you. And be sure to daily use our free SomersaultNOW dashboard, created especially for publishing and marketing professionals.

“Attention for Love Wins began in late February when the book trailer stirred debate on Twitter. Many bloggers responded to Rob Bell's claims about Heaven and Hell with outcries of universalism and heresy, propelling Bell into the top 10 trending topics on Twitter, and prompting HarperOne to advance the book's release by two weeks.”

Is this another example of how the right kind of controversy can sell books – at least in general market bookstores? Controversy hasn't been a reliable sales booster in CBA – outside of a few books like The Shack, and in that case perhaps it wasn’t so much controversy as the enthusiastic personal word-of-mouth conversation that sold the book.

It'll be interesting to see whether controversy helps sell Love Wins in CBA and if stores will stock it if enough people come in requesting it. Another question to ponder: do people shop in CBA bookstores to buy books they expect to disagree with? Or do most consumers go into a CBA bookstore to buy books that affirm their beliefs?

What are your thoughts on this from a bookselling perspective?

In short, this data shows that: (1) consumers are interested in interacting with advertising that bears a QR code – thus, the promise of additional benefits in the form of deals, coupons, videos, sweepstakes, social media interactions, etc.; and (2) QR codes can help an ad break through the clutter by increasing the chance it will be remembered, great news for advertisers who have already integrated a QR code strategy into a traditional advertising campaign or are looking to insert them in a future campaign.

View the full survey results in pdf form.

How should you be using QR codes in your marketing communications mix?

Update: The above research is interesting, especially in light of the article QR Codes May Be Going Away. 

On Fast Company’s Co.Design (@fastcodesign), Warren Berger (@GlimmerGuy), the grand inquisitor of the website a more beautiful question, says “breakthroughs are often born with someone asking ‘What if...?’”

What if someone sold socks that didn’t match? In his new book Disrupt, Luke Williams (@LukeGWilliams), talks about how that offbeat question was the impetus for the launch of Little Miss Matched, a company whose purposely mismatched socks proved surprisingly popular with young girls. It’s one of a number of examples Williams cites of new business innovations that began with what he calls “a disruptive hypothesis.” Another better-known one is Netflix, whose business model provided an answer to the question, What if a video rental company didn’t charge late fees?...

Innovation is driven by questions that are original, bold, counterintuitive, and perceptive.

Read the article in full.

What “disruptive hypothesis” will you use today to lead to game-changing innovation in your world? What questions should publishers, agents, organizations, and authors be asking?

At age 28, Elon Musk co-founded popular e-payment company Paypal. He went on to start SpaceX, the first private company to launch a rocket into space, and Tesla Motors, which builds electric cars. CNN's Amar Bakshi talked to Musk about inventions he thinks will change the world. His predictions are

1. A fully reusable orbital rocket
2. Rapid, low-cost, perfect DNA sequencing
3. Viable fusion

How big are you thinking? What’s your outrageous idea that will change the world of publishing? What are you doing today to make it happen?

Does “the cloud” pose another opportunity for book publishers? The chart above indicates that demand for wireless access to the Web is only going to grow in the coming years, as will the diversity of devices used for that function.

Book publishers, organizations, agents, and authors should be thinking now, not only how to profitably publish content for ereader consumption of complete downloaded books, but also ways of monetizing content that resides dynamically and virtually in the Internet cloud. One idea: paid subscriptions, taking a cue from the new paywall business model announced by The New York Times (by the way, here’s an analysis of the announcement by Bloomberg Businessweek and broad coverage links by paidContent).

The New York Times is banking on the strength of its brand, even though people may be able to get the (relatively) same news free elsewhere (see 10 Ways To Get Around Online News Subscriptions And Paywalls). But it may work better with book publishers, since each publishers’ content is (relatively) unique from others.

What do you think?

You'll remember we highlighted Information Theory in our March 8 blog post. Another review of that concept is written by Wally Metts on his blog "the daysman." Here's an excerpt:

What is the relationship between information and wisdom? How do we handle the flood of “information,” especially if we are simply addicted to surprise? Frankly, never have we known so much and understood so little. There is so much information we can manage the pieces but fail to see the patterns.

Read the post in full.

CNN reports on the National Geographic special series "7 Billion" that, among the entire population of the world, the average person is a 28-year-old Han Chinese male. And the most common person in the world is right handed, has an annual income under $12,000, and owns a cellphone, but does not have a bank account. What are the implications of this study in the world of publishing?