The latest "World Map of Social Networks," confirms Facebook’s global dominance in social media, with nearly 700 million users; but, while gaining users abroad, Facebook is losing U.S. fans. Or is it?Continue reading...

The times they are a-changing in Australia. A new report has it that Aussies are more likely to stay home than go out at night, are less interested in beer-drinking (awesome beer ads notwithstanding) than in the recent past, and are much more interested in recreational activities such as sporting equipment or television.

“The conventional wisdom is that Australians spend like there’s no tomorrow, are reluctant to save, put purchases on the credit card and love a beer, smoke and flutter (gambling). But the stereotype is outdated,” said CommSec chief economist Craig James, author of The New Aussie Consumer, according to StartupSmart.Continue reading...

When it comes to determining the ROI of social marketing, brands are more concerned about engagement, a big part of which is what gets shared, than the number of followers they've accrued on the social web.

That prompted ShareThis (whose button enables one-click sharing), Starcom MediaVest Group and Rubinson Partners to look at how and why people share online, in a research project they’re calling “the most comprehensive study of online social sharing to date.”

Among their findings, sharing now produces an estimated 10% of all web traffic and 31% of referral traffic to sites from search engines and social networks.Continue reading...

Happy World Anti-Counterfeiting Day!

Celebrated each June 8th, this year's 13th annual event sees the launch of a global portal that aims to help consumers avoid knock-offs and "find safe and genuine online stockists of popular designer goods." That new website (launching with brands including adidas and UGG Australia): Brand-i.org, which enables consumers to distinguish between genuine sellers of big brands and rogue traders of counterfeit goods. 

Naturally, luxury brands are alarmed at the rise of counterfeits on a global scale, vigorously defending their brands by taking legal action. While customs and law enforcement officials around the world attempt to squash purveyors of fake name brand luxury goods, academic research on counterfeits increasingly supports a counterintuitive position: these phony goods may actually be good for business.Continue reading...

In the era of the Internet, turns out banning billboard ads for alcohol, cigarettes or drugs is ineffective.

Strictures on such traditional advertising are superseded by the ubiquity of online ads, which actually make the latter more effective according to a recent study entitled Advertising Bans and the Substitutability of Online and Offline Advertising, published in the April issue of the Journal of Marketing Research.Continue reading...

With Congressman Anthony Weiner's Twitter scandal at the top of the political news cycle, the social messaging service which allows you to tell people you've never met that you just relieved your bladder is more popular than ever. And there's new data to prove it. 

The Pew Research Center's Pew Internet and American Life Project (Pewternet?) just updated its data on Twitter usage. It's worth a read for the casually curious, and an absolute requirement for marketers and brand strategists.

Most of all, the results should most remind everyone that Twitter users are not at all representative of larger population.Continue reading...

Men may defer to women on lots of purchases for the home, ranging from dinnerware to wallpaper. But when it comes to big-screen televisions, Sharp believes that men care in outsized ways what is purchased for their household.

And so as Sharp begins peddling the industry’s first 70-inch high-definition LCD TVs under the tagline “Big is too small a word,” the electronics brand is specifically targeting the preferences of men.

Sharp has concluded that while women influence and often conclude the purchase of TVs for the home, men have a lot to say about this particular outlay more than most others — meriting supersized new words.Continue reading...

Looking for a deeper dive on your search results? Google’s new Correlate system is a data-mining tool that can be used for virtually any data search. A bonanza for marketers, educators, economists, publishers and many other professions, the genesis of the new service is integral to the model.

During the flu epidemic of 2008, Google noted that the "activity of certain search terms are good indicators of actual flu activity" and subsequently launched Google Flu Trends, a warning system based on the statistics. 

The ten-ton penny drop: a quantifiable correlation between the search world and the real world, in an 'aha!' moment illustrated in a comic that recalls Google's Chrome comic book explainer by Scott McCloud.Continue reading...