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The latest Nielsen (@NielsenWire) report (pdf) shows that social media’s popularity continues to grow, connecting people with just about everything they watch and buy.

·         60% percent of people who use three or more digital means of research for product purchases learn about a specific brand or retailer from a social networking site.

·         Social networks and blogs took 22.5% of Internet usage time in May 2011, beating online games' 9.8%, email's 7.6%, portals' 4.5%, video and films' 4.4% and search's 4%.

·         US Web users spent 53.5 billion minutes on Facebook during the month, beating out Yahoo's 17.2 billion minutes, Google's 12.5 billion minutes, YouTube's 9.5 billion minutes, eBay's 4.5 billion minutes, and Apple's 4.3 billion minutes.

·         Facebook received 140 million unique visitors in May, with 62% of page views on the site attributable to females; 50 million individuals accessed Blogger; 23.6 million went to Twitter.

·         Blogging provider Wordpress attracted 22.4 million people, trailed by MySpace with 19.3 million, LinkedIn with 17.8 million, and Tumblr, another blog hosting platform, with 11.9 million.

·         53% of "active" social networkers currently follow a brand.

·         Year over year growth of people accessing social networks via mobile rose 62%: 46.5 million people visiting Facebook, 11.5 million for Twitter, 6 million LinkedIn, and 4 million MySpace.

·         In all, 97% of members access social networks on a computer, 37% employ mobile phones, 3% deploy a games console or iPad, and 2% leverage Web-enabled TV sets and ereaders.

·         About 30% of consumers value being able to use social networks on their phone.

·         A further 21% liked scanning barcodes with a handset, 20% cited making payments, 16% prioritized "check-in" services such as Foursquare and 13% enjoyed giving feedback to companies.

·         67% of smartphone owners had downloaded gaming apps, 65% selected equivalent weather-related tools, 60% utilized applications from social networks, and 55% used navigation and search facilities.

·         17.8 million women watch video on social networks, versus 13.6 million men.

Read the report in full (pdf).

Also see our previous blogpost, “Report: Half of Americans Are Now Social Networkers.”

MultichannelMerchant (@mcmerchant) says many marketers are not using 2-dimensional mobile barcodes properly.

Though they’re mainstream in countries like Japan, QR codes are still fairly new to most US consumers. If you just slap a QR code on the back of a catalog and don’t explain what it is, why it's there, how to read it – and include a backup URL in case the user scans it and comes up with an error – it may not gain any traction.

And if the QR code does not direct to a site that can be rendered on a mobile device, making it hard for the user to navigate with ease, the user is going to close the mobile browser and not come back.

Read this in full and see case studies cited.

Let Somersault help you set your entire mobile marketing strategy. And be sure to use our mobile site.

Radio-Info.com (@radio_info) says, “Teens today are the most digitally connected generation we have ever seen.” A study just released by Nielsen (@NielsenWire) on teen media usage offers the following insight.

Teens:

·         Are the Heaviest Mobile Video Viewers

·         Are More Receptive to Mobile Advertising than their Elders

·         Out-Text All Other Age Groups

·         Talk Less on the Phone: Besides

·         Grew Up in the Age of Social Media—and It Shows

·         Watch Less TV than the General Population:

·         Spend Less Time on their Computers

Radio-Info says, “Based on this research and other key findings from recent studies on teen consumers, here are four considerations for marketers aspiring to reach teens today:

1. Speak in bullet points.

2. Don’t be “just another ad.”

3. Stand Out

4. Think Multi-Platform

Read this in full.

Damon Poeter (@dpoeter) writes in PCMag.com (@PCMag) that the percentage of adult Internet users using sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn is now 65%, up from 61% a year ago, according to a report released by the Pew Research Center (@pewinternet & @pewresearch).

Accounting for the percentage of adults who don't use the Internet at all, that still means that half of all Americans now use social networking sites, Pew researchers say.

The number of Americans using such sites has exploded since 2005, when Pew found that just 8% of Internet users, or about 5% of all adult Americans, said they did. The percentage of Internet users saying they use social networking sites has more than doubled since 2008, when 29% of respondents said they were using them, according to the Pew survey.

Pew reports that women aged 18 to 29 are the most voracious users of social networking sites, with 89% of Internet users in that group participating in such sites and 69% of them reporting that they do so daily. Accounting for all age groups, 69% of adult women using the Internet say they’re social networkers as compared with 60% of men.

Read the story in full.

Read the research report.

Also see HubSpot’s (@HubSpot) article, “46 Million Americans Check Social Media Sites Multiple Times Per Day,” based on the 2011 Social Habit report, released by Edison Research and Arbitron.

What implications does this research hold for your publishing and marketing strategy? Let Somersault help you think it through.

On O’Reilly Radar (@radar), Jenn Webb (@JennWebb) interviews Rochelle Grayson (@RochelleGrayson), CEO of BookRiff, (@BookRiff), a publishing start-up going live at the end of September. Jenn asks, “Ever want to compile your own cookbook, travel guide or textbook? Has your publisher edited out sections of your book you'd like to share with interested readers? BookRiff aims to solve these problems by creating new ways to access and compile content.”

Her interview explains how BookRiff works and how it can benefit publishers and consumers. Rochelle says her company is based on an open market concept, allowing publishers to sell the content they want at prices they set and consumers to buy and customize that content as they see fit; each getting a percentage of sales along the way.

A Riff is a remix of chapters from published books, essays, articles, or even one's own content. The concept behind BookRiff is to create an online platform that allows consumers and publishers to remix and to resell content, while ensuring that all original content owners and contributors get paid.

BookRiff’s target audience is “domain experts” who can curate — and perhaps even create — content that is of interest to a specific reading audience. This could include things like cookbooks, travel guides, extended “authors editions,” and custom textbooks.

Read this in full.

How do you foresee this effecting your publishing/sales/distribution plans for the next 12 months?

Social Media Marketing by the Numbers Infographic by Mashable (@mashable)

How does a medical facility in the middle of nowhere become so well known and respected that world leaders want to be consumers of it? According to Lee Aase (@LeeAase), director, Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, word-of-mouth (WOM) fueled by social media is the driving force. Watch (1 and 2) his relaxed case-study presentation from a few years ago and adapt his success principles (see the above pyramid) to advance your brand.

Let Somersault help you achieve success.

Landing Page Infographic by KISSmetrics (@KISSmetrics).

Search Engine marketing agency Trada (@Trada) held a webinar today explaining "Landing Page Psychology:"

Visitors are likely to have a certain amount of wariness as they're asked to part with money or personal information. Use the following elements to work toward removing this friction from the buying or decision-making cycles.

1. Incite urgency
2. Encourage feelings of value
3. Display credibility
4. Develop trust

See the slides of this webinar.

Watch the video.

Read the guide.

Twitter Infographic by Touch (@touchagency).

Jonathan Richman (@jonmrich), Group Director, Strategic Planning for Possible Worldwide (@possible), writes on Warc (@WarcEditors) that if consumers don’t love your Web marketing, it may as well be invisible. And it’s difficult to conduct a SWOT analysis to discover how your competitor stacks up against you because, “when it comes to digital, everything is your competitor.”

Your competitors in digital are everything else that takes time away from your digital program. Everything. Your competitors aren’t just a product in the same category or even brands in the same industry. It’s everything. That means that your competition online isn’t your arch nemesis’ brand site, but it’s also episodes of Family Guy on Hulu. It’s Lolcats1 and Perez Hilton’s blog. Sure, you may not admit to visiting any of these, but someone is accounting for the millions of visitors a month to these sites.

Richman offers a list of digital marketing sins that cause your customers to say “We Hate Your .com”:

·         Blunder #1: Trying to Do It All

·         Blunder #2: Random Targeting

·         Blunder #3: Death by Boredom

·         Blunder #4: All for one and… all for one

Read this in full.

Let Somersault help you succeed in digitally marketing your brand.