Both paid search and social media play crucial roles in the marketing efforts of brands these days, yet the approach taken when it comes to integrating either of these marketing channels is completely dissimilar. On the one hand you have the click-through centric, bid-based and conversion hungry world of paid search that is primarily focused on driving sales and leads. Social media marketing, however, is on the other side of the spectrum, and is primarily utilized for building brand awareness and encouraging conversation, with the resulting ROI from these endeavors relatively difficult to measure. Differences aside, these two marketing channels might be more closely related than you would think.

An October 2009 study by GroupM Search, M80, and ComScore found a striking correlation between brand discovery on social media and search behavior. In summary, interaction through social media can ultimately lead to more overall searches on a brand, a rise in lower-funnel searches, and an increase in both conversions and click-through rates.

Key findings from the study:

• Consumers exposed to a brand’s social media efforts are 2.8 times more likely to search for that brand’s products
• There was a 50% increase in click-through rate in paid search when consumers were exposed to a brand’s paid search ads and social media content
• There was a 42-point increase in searcher penetration on a brand’s key terms when consumers were exposed to both paid search and social media, compared to just paid search alone

The study’s results show that strong brand awareness through social media helps drive the overall effectiveness and success of a brand’s paid search campaigns.

Matt Lawson, director of marketing for Marin Software, provides these tips in his article on Mashable on how to optimize your social and paid search programs to work in tandem to boost overall ROI:

• Make your social campaigns search friendly
  Be sure that all your social media efforts include appropriate tags and are properly indexed, and that the metadata for pages contain the top brand keywords. This will help individuals searching for your brand to better find your social media content in addition to your paid search ads and natural search results.
• Experiment with keyword advertising on social media sites
  Take advantage of a social site’s advertising opportunities through keyword targeting, yet keep in mind that the way these ads work differ greatly from how they function in a paid search campaign. For example, Facebook targets ads based on the personal information found on a user’s profile.
• Create social media-influenced paid search campaigns
  Pay attention to the conversations occurring between your brand and your fans, as well as between consumers about your brand. Analyze the keywords that are often used in these discussions and incorporate these terms in to your paid search campaigns to better reach your target audience.

When integrated correctly, social media and search can work together to drive a greater overall increase in ROI than either could have done alone. How, if at all, have your social media programs affected your paid search results or strategy?

[Content originally posted for Overdrive Interactive]

Location-sharing social networks have steadily been gaining traction in the social media world, and Foursquare is currently leading the way in overall popularity and name recognition due to its ease of use and slick integration. Mashable even wrote back in July that FourSquare could be the next Twitter.

The premise is quite simple. Install the application on your mobile phone (applications are now available for iPhones, Blackberries, and Android Phones) or browse to their mobile site and “check in” whenever you visit a new venue. Not only do you receive points and badges for checking in and reaching certain milestones (as well as blast a message on Facebook and Twitter alerting your friends and followers as to your whereabouts), but if you visit a particular location often enough, you could be crowned as Mayor.

Many bars, restaurants, and cafes have started to offer discounts and free offers to loyal patrons who prove their mayorship, including free appetizers or a drink on the house. This sort of friendly competition, while of course a lot of fun, can also be extremely beneficial for a business’s overall exposure.

Foursquare could potentially serve as a source of valuable traffic data for your business, as it logs not only how many times customers have visited your venue, but also the frequency of their visits. In addition, customers can leave comments or suggestions when they check in, allowing business owners access to invaluable feedback in much the same way Yelp does.

In the future, Foursquare intends on implementing a more detailed dashboard view for participating venues to make it easier to keep track of who’s visiting, how often, where they’re coming from, and where they’re going next.

Foursquare and other similar location-sharing services might just be the next evolutionary step for social media, and could completely redefine social media marketing.

According to a new research study put out by email delivery auditing and optimization firm Pivotal Veracity, the timing of delivery for communications in an email marketing campaign can be as, if not more, important than the actual relevancy and content of the messages themselves. The time of day, day of the week, and month of the year can all have a significant influence on the success of one’s campaign. Yet often times these factors are overlooked or downplayed, resulting in a limited engagement level from your target recipients, and an unnecessarily restricted ROI.

Pivotal Veracity’s Engagement Index found that financial services, technology and communications firms tended to be most successful in holding the interest of their recipients, whereas retail, travel and hospitality companies struggled to engage users with their communications. Retail and travel marketers, however, were more apt to being effected by seasonality changes. Travel communications engagement received a nice boost in the months of April and May, just before the summer vacation season jumped into full swing, whereas retail outlets saw their biggest rebound in August as consumers returned to work and school.

Pivotal Veracity’s study also found that many email recipients, especially in the B2C sector, do not access their personal mailboxes as much as their work accounts. “The average elapsed time between when messages are first sent to when they are first seen grew from 23.2 hours in January to 25.9 in August,” Pivotal Veracity says. This significant increase means that in general, consumers will not see your message for more than 24 hours. This could spell major trouble for any marketer who relies on time sensitive campaigns in order to get their key brand messages across.

Importance and appeal of communications is a major player in determining how much time elapses between when a consumer receives a message to when he or she actually reads it. Pivotal Veracity’s Email Engagement Index technology found that travel marketers’ messages came in at the highest appeal and importance between the months of March and April, with an average elapsed time of 2.9 hours. Retailers on the other hand struggled during the month of August, coming in at almost 5 hours of elapsed time between when a communication was received, till when it was actually read.

The Relevancy & Response metric measures the percentage of email that is actually read and engaged with. Coming out on top with a 34% read rate, not surprisingly, were the communications of financial institutions, who often send out critical and time sensitive correspondence. Travel and hospitality fared the worst, which was only able to garner an 18% read rate from their target consumers.

Finally, contact frequency and deliverability can be an important metric for comparing your campaign performance with competitors. In addition, it can act as a source of discovery for any disconnect that may occur between the number of communications sent versus the number of emails found in a target consumer’s inbox. Here, retail and travel marketers come out on top, demonstrating a much higher message velocity of 4.8 and 3.7 messages a month respectively. Financial and technology communications, who as mentioned before both command a high read rate, also tended to be distributed the least amount per month, with only 2 and 2.6 emails on average being delivered to their intended target.

Multiple factors go in to creating and sustaining a successful email marketing campaign, and Pivotal Veracity’s report only stands to strongly reinforce this point. No longer can content alone attract and retain the interest of your target consumers. Instead, strategic distribution, time relevancy, and frequency of communication all play an increasingly important role in triggering desired consumer response and boosting ROI.

This past week, Facebook was ranked one of America’s most trusted companies, blew past the 300 million mark in total users, and hinted at the release of voice chat powered by Boston-based Vivox. Google increased its ever-growing hold on the web with its acquisition of reCAPTCHA, whose technology they can utilize to help with large text-scanning projects such as Google Books. The company also released Google Public Sector, which offers tools and best practices for public sector collaboration. Following up on the sale of the popular VoIP and chat service Skype comes a lawsuit by the founder’s who are suing eBay for copyright infringement of a core peer-to-peer technology found in the program. Finally, Bing continues to skyrocket in popularity among other search engine services.

• Facebook to Launch Voice Chat – On its way to implementing a video chat service within its platform, Facebook will be rolling out a voice chat feature during the next couple weeks. The technology for the service is being offered by Vivox, a Boston-based company that has created voice chat applications for virtual worlds. Voice chat will work seamlessly within the Facebook framework, and support everything from one-on-one chats to group discussions.

• Facebook Tops 300 Million User Mark – In a blog post on Tuesday, Facebook CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that not only was the service now in the green, but that it also had recently passed the 300 million user mark. The growth of Facebook has actually be accelerating, as it took only 5 months to reach this milestone, compared to the 8 months it took to make it from 100 to 200 million users.

• Facebook In Top 10 of Most Trusted US Companies – Facebook is now ranked as one of the ten most trusted companies for privacy in the US. The study was conducted by TRUSTe and the Ponemon Institute, and consisted of a two-stage survey which focused on the “privacy policies and practices of leading consumer brands.”

• Google Takes Over reCAPTCHA – Google continues to gain power over the web with its recent acquisition of reCAPTCHA, whose technology is used to power many of the captcha security boxes to make sure the user is in fact a human, and not a robot or spammer. Google will use this technology to power large scale scanning projects such as Google Books.

• Google Public Sector Launched – The US Government, after recently declaring that it will be making use of many of Google’s cloud-based products to streamline operations, now has apps specifically designed to work with the public sector. The page is more of a directory and information site for government agencies and organizations, and will help these entities to coordinate more effectively.

• eBay Sued For More Than $75 Million Per Day – eBay, who recently sold Skype a few weeks ago to a group of private investors, is now being sued by the software’s creators for copyright infringement. The main focus of this lawsuit is around a core piece of peer-to-peer technology that Skype uses and which Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom have been attempting to reclaim since early March.

• Bing Currently Fastest Growing Search Engine – Microsoft continues to make strides with its new search engine, with official data coming from Nielson MegaView Search that Bing has a month-over-month growth rate of about a little over 22%. Compare this with the second largest growth rate of 2.9%, and it becomes apparent that Bing is quickly on its way up the popularity scale when it comes to search engines.

Things are truly looking good for Facebook these days. Now that the service is finally making money, albeit only $2 per person, and will soon be implementing video and voice chat features, it seems as if this social networking giant is on an unstoppable course to dominating the social market. The fact that Facebook is also one of the most trusted companies in the US will do well to solidify the service’s future growth, and should be a source of great concern for competitors such as Twitter, of which Facebook has recently launched a full-scale assault upon. Does Facebook have the momentum and power to ultimately become the only social networking service worth using?

Meanwhile, Google continues on its never-ending domination of the web with the acquisition of reCAPTCHA. The technology and service is featured on over 100,000 sites worldwide, and in addition to providing increased security for Google’s services, will more importantly allow the company to improve their books and newspaper scanning process. This will undoubtedly give Google Books and Google News Archive Search a significant competitive edge. The release of Google Public Sector shows that not even the US Government can escape Google’s reach. Not that they were trying very hard in the first place however, with Apps.gov already featuring a whole suite of Google cloud-based applications. Is Google becoming too much of an influence in the web market?

eBay thought they had seen the last of the Skype debacle, however Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, the original creators, have other plans for the online-auction giant. It seems that the core peer-to-peer technology featured in Skype was copyrighted to Mr. Friis and, as every download of the program is seen as a copyright infringement, the founders are seeking a mere $75 million dollars per day in damages. Most likely this amount will be reduced significantly once the investigation is underway, however other online companies should make note of this situation. With the proliferation of ideas and technology becoming more readily available in the online world, lawsuits have become more plentiful as the claimed creators seek to defend their ideas, or make a quick buck.

Bing continues to show impressive growth when compared to other popular search engines. Though still far behind in total searches, the service is quickly closing the gap. More recently, the growth has been due to a large-scale advertising campaign launched by Microsoft. The fusion of Twitter and Bing search results (bingtweets.com) and the recently launched visual search have also helped to ratchet up popularity of the still relatively new search service.

Facebook continues to make headlines this week with the release of their application for Google Android users, their integration into the just released iTunes 9, the implementation of @Mentions in status updates, and the launch of Facebook Lite. Twitter again went down, though this time it was thanks to Apple and Steve Jobs’ keynote speech. The service also made some significant changes to its Terms Of Service, which opens the door for advertisements, and along with Facebook, was also integrated into the new iTunes release. In addition, a pair of teenage girls in Australia opt to call for help on Facebook instead of dialing 000, the country’s equivalent of 911.

The rest of the top stories for this week follow in Overdrive Interactive’s 3rd edition of the Social Media Weekly Buzz:

• Facebook Google Android Application – Facebook has managed to maintain a solid mobile phone presence through its development of applications for such popular devices as the Blackberry Smartphone and the iPhone. A mobile version of the Facebook website is also available for phones with internet capabilities. Now Android users as well can join in on the fun, as Facebook on Tuesday launched a compatible app for the OS. Though not as full-featured as the other apps, it does have some Android specific features, such as integration into Android’s Live Folders.

• Girls Update Facebook Status While Trapped – The next time you find yourself in danger, forget dialing 911, and just update your Facebook status. That’s what two girls in Australia opted to do when they found themselves trapped in a storm drain.

• WordPress Now Functioning at Real-Time Speed – Nowadays, many people turn to real-time services such as Twitter to discover the latest news and updates from their favorite sources. The only way to keep track of your favorite blogs up until this point, however, has been through RSS, which can take up to hours to update. WordPress has recently altered this medium by supporting something called RSS Cloud, which pushes notifications to followers that your feed has updated, and brings blog updates to real-time.

• Steve Jobs Brings Down Twitter – Twitter again went down this week, but this time the source of the problem wasn’t malicious, or a malfunction. Really it was Apple’s claim to fame, as Steve Jobs made the keynote speech at their 9/9/09 event. The result? Mass tweets on Mr. Jobs’ return and lots of 503 errors.

• Find Friends on YouTube – Soon YouTube, just like Facebook, will make it easier to find your friends by recommending users that it believes you may have a connection with. You will then be able to easily connect and subscribe with your acquaintances. YouTube will use Gmail account information and your video sending habits to determine the most appropriate matches and suggestions.

• iTunes Implements Social Media Support – This latest release was a big one, and among the many changes of Apple’s popular music player was the integration of Twitter, Facebook and Last.fm support. For Facebook, the album art, artist and album name, and a link to the iTunes store will be posted to your wall. For Twitter, the only difference will be the lack of album art and the addition of the #iTunes hashtag. The Last.fm integration is a bit more in depth, such as giving you the ability to share your playlist with others.

• Tag Your Friends in Facebook Status Updates – Facebook has long allowed users to tag their friends in photos, videos, and notes. This week however, the service took it a step further by allowing users to tag their friends in Facebook status updates, which is very similar to Twitter’s @Mentions. Just include the “@” symbol before typing your friend’s name, and a drop-down box will allow you to select the correct person. Apparently this feature will soon be pushed out to applications as well.

• Facebook Lite Launches – Facebook has officially given the green light to the Lite version of its service which has been under testing for a while now. The experience is very bare-bones and Twitter-esque in simplicity. For now, only U.S. users are able to access this new experience.

• Twitter Updates their TOS – Twitter overhauled their TOS this week now that they have a better understanding of how individuals use their service. Among the many changes implemented, the more important modifications include rules for advertising, spam, ownership, and APIs.

The integration of social media into iTunes was a huge step forward for Apple. Though at the moment quite basic in function, Apple has the opportunity, after further experimentation, to leverage Facebook and Twitter updates as a marketing tool for their already popular music program. One of the core features of Apple products is the way they hold you to within the Apple environment. Apple’s products work the best with other Apple products. By expanding their reach to Twitter, Facebook, and Last.fm, they further solidify their hold on their current customers.

It’s quite scary, however, to see that as social media, and social networking in particular, become more widespread, individuals are turning to it as their main source of communication when not the most appropriate for the situation. The fact that two girls trapped in a storm drain would think of Facebook status updates before dialing 000, Australia’s equivalent of 911, is mind-boggling. However, it shows that as the younger generation grows up around all of this technology, these new forms of communication may naturally take precedence over more traditional methods.

Facebook, it seems, is quickly emulating some of the more popular features of Twitter. The introduction of Facebook Lite gives a more stripped-down feel to the service, and limits it to only the core functions, giving it a simplicity that Twitter has been so revered for. In addition, the introduction of @Mentions in status updates is a direct stab at one of the most popular features of Twitter updates. However, Facebook isn’t the only one stealing ideas from other services. YouTube will soon be implementing a feature that is almost a carbon copy of Facebook’s suggestion box, and will allow users to find and connect with potential acquaintances.

One of the most interesting developments this week for internet marketers is the new Twitter Terms Of Service. According to Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, the door has basically been left open in terms of particular advertising options. This provides a great deal of revenue opportunities for marketers and Twitter alike. The company has recently been struggling to find a model that can result in a positive ROI. Could we soon be seeing ads on Twitter that correspond to tweets of the people we follow? Relevance will definitely be king in determining which marketing strategies will be met with success.

Welcome to the second edition of Social Media Weekly Buzz.

This week, both Google and Facebook managed to steal the majority of the headlines. Gmail’s outage on Tuesday sparked widespread panic and led most people, ironically, to use Google search to investigate the incident. In addition, the oh-so familiar, yet quite stark, Google search landing page has finally been patented, five years after being submitted to the USPTO. Facebook tested out a new ad scheme with direct offer engagement ads, and is being accused of leading a Welsh citizen to murder their partner. Also, have you checked out Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on YouTube yet?

All this and more follows below:

• Gmail Outage – At 12:30pm PST, a small fraction of Gmail’s servers were taken offline for routine maintenance. Unfortunately, Google underestimated the load recent changes placed on the request routers… The result? Gmail went down for 100 minutes, and online chaos quickly ensued.

• Google’s Search Landing Page Now Patented – After 5 years of fierce debate with federal bureaucrats, Google has finally won the right to patent their unmistakable home page. Google now owns the concept of having a large search box in the middle of the page, on top of two big buttons, with several links scattered here and there. Does this spell trouble for sites which possess similar layouts, such as Yahoo search?

• Facebook Tests Direct Response Ads – Craving a Chick-fil-A Chicken Biscuit? How about if it’s free? Soon you might be seeing more ad offers like this on Facebook if their testing of direct offer engagement ads goes well. Facebook has recently been exploring different advertising options as it gradually shifts away from its traditional sales funnel.

• Facebook Regional Networks No More – Regional networks on Facebook are now officially gone. This move comes as Facebook attempts to expand beyond its college roots to a worldwide communication platform, not unlike Twitter. But is that really what users want?

• Facebook Jealousy Blamed on Murder – A murder trial in South Wales has taken an interesting twist, with a UK prosecutor arguing that Facebook-related jealousy pre-empted the tragic event. Apparently the whole thing got started when Mrs. Jones started to “expand her social horizons” online. The last straw? When she changed her Facebook status to “single”.

• Kremlin Launches YouTube Channel – Russian President Dmitri Medvedev launched his very own YouTube channel, located at www.youtube.com/kremlin. The main purpose of the channel will be to reach out to and connect with the youth of Russia. So far he has covered topics from good neighborhood ties between schoolchildren, to the outcome of the Second World War.

• eBay Sells Skype – On Tuesday, eBay officially announced that it would be selling the VoIP and chat service Skype to a group of private investors for $2.75 billion. eBay will still retain a 35 percent equity stake in the service however, which they hope will increase in value under the new management. The decision to sell was provoked by a lack of synergy between Skype and eBay’s e-commerce and payments services.

The Gmail downtime serves as a reminder of how much of our lives are becoming dependent on the Internet. As more and more services become cloud-based in nature, it is imperative that network interruption be minimized at all costs. Fortunately the Gmail downtime occurred during the night, which helped save what could have been a large-scale interruption in productivity for the US. Twitter experienced a similar issue not too long ago, though that issue was more malicious in nature, and not just a big mistake.

Facebook continues to modify its services in order to improve both the experience of both consumers and advertisers. The direct offer engagement ads are a great source of lead generation for businesses, however it will be interesting to see how many people are willing to enter their address and other personal info for discounts and promotions. This is definitely a jump in the right direction for Facebook as it tries to shift away from its traditional sales funnel. The major step in this development is that companies will now receive instant results from the advertisements they publish on the service.

The Facebook alteration that might not be met with open arms is the decision to completely remove regional network categories. As Facebook attempts to take a more worldly approach to its communications platform, it has the potential of upsetting long time users of its service. For them, Facebook served as a tool to better connect with friends, not strangers. In addition, many users prefer Facebook over Twitter for the very fact that it isn’t… Twitter. Any step closer to the other service could be taken very negatively among its fan base.

The sale of Skype was definitely a smart move for eBay, whose e-commerce and online payments businesses really have nothing in common with the VoIP service. The real question is what prompted eBay to make the acquisition in the first place? Earlier in April StumbleUpon was also sold off to a group of investors after a failed attempt to synergize operations. Fortunately now the company can turn to focusing on its core eBay and PayPal businesses.

Welcome to the first of many social media recaps that will be featured right here on our eMarketing blog. We will be gathering a weekly digest of the top stories and latest happenings within the social media sphere, and from these headlines offer our suggestions and conclusions on what the overall impact might be for marketers and casual users alike.

This week, not unlike any other, threw us some interesting developments in the social media world. Most of the buzz, however, was focused on new Twitter and Facebook developments, both the good and the bad. YouTube also managed to make news with a new revenue sharing platform, in addition to lending a helping hand to Lindsay Lohan.

Without further delay, here are the top social media headlines for the past week:

• Facebook Privacy Changes – Facebook has been falling into trouble lately with Canadian authorities due to being in violation of the country’s privacy laws. In particular, the privacy issues which surround the retention of customer data after a user cancels his or her account. This could cause wider implications for other social networks concerning the way user data is currently being handled.

• Should Twitter Sell? – It seems that with strong competition coming from Facebook’s end, especially after the FriendFeed acquisition, many individuals have suggested that it might be time for the popular micro-blogging service to sell out to a larger and stronger partner. However, while it might be profitable prospect, how much growth the service still has left in it can only be speculated at this point, and therefore this decision should not be taken lightly.

• Woofer – 140 characters holding you back from what you really want to say? Why not use 1400? Enter Woofer, a carbon-copy of Twitter that alters the service from a micro to a macro-blogging atmosphere. Just sign in with your Twitter name and Woof away!

• Bit.ly and Yfrog Partnership – One of the most popular URL shorteners available on the web partners with Yfrog, a current underdog in the Twitter picture-sharing landscape. The result? Much trouble for TwitPic, currently the leader in this segment.

• YouTube lends a helping hand to Ms. Lohan – The LAPD released video footage of an apparent break-in of Lindsay Lohan’s home with the hope of catching the three suspects. Even police departments these days are realizing the true potential of social media.

• YouTube Videos a Source of Revenue? – YouTube announced that it may soon offering money to individuals whose videos have a specific number of views and viral potential. The source of the income? Advertisements that the service will sell against the video.

• Social Media Use in Companies Continues to Rise – In a recent report by eMarketer, it was found that currently 59% of brand marketers are now using social media. What’s really interesting is that within 12 months, 82% are planning on integrating social media into their overall marketing plan. The most popular social media channels? Facebook, Twitter, online videos, and blogs.

What exactly can you take away from these headlines? Well, for one, governments are cracking down on privacy issues that have been surfacing recently due to increased usage of social media outlets. The result could be stricter laws and regulations across the board, with increased security for users, but a decline in the ability for companies in particular to gather important statistics on potential clients.

Twitter is again in the news thanks to Facebook and bit.ly. Certainly the partnership of bit.ly and Yfrog will mean TwitPic must scramble in order for it to continue to maintain its large market share, that is if Twitter is still around in its current form. Though Twitter adamantly denies it is for sale, the prospect is that there is a lot of money to be made. The key in this situation is determining whether the service has any significant additional growth, as selling out too soon could result in lost profits for founder Biz Stone.

Speaking of profits, the fact that popular videos on YouTube, which meet the correct guidelines the service laid out, can soon be making an income from ad revenue is a pivotal move forward, and might even serve as an incentive for posters to submit higher quality material. It is interesting to see that as the service continues to grow and transform, even police departments are jumping on the social media bandwagon, with the LAPD revolutionizing the way we will search for suspected criminals. Could this be the beginning of social media law enforcement?

The fact of the matter is, social media is here to stay. The eMarketer report only solidifies this position, as 82% of companies within the next 12 months are will have integrated some sort of social media platform into their marketing programs. Only 13% have said outright that they do not use, or are not planning to use, social media any time soon. The main reason? They just don’t know where to begin. This is why it’s important to find a social media marketing company who has a clear strategy for this revolution. They can provide insight as to why social media marketing must be a pivotal aspect of any successful company’s overall business plan.

With all the hype surrounding social media these days, it’s hard not to draw parallels to the dot-com boom that took place in the not-too-distant past. The shear growth which has occurred in the past few years on well-known social media websites such as Facebook, YouTube, Myspace, Twitter, and Wikipedia, to name a few, is at the very least mind-boggling. However, social media has in fact been around for longer than most people tend to believe.

One of the earliest forms of social media is the bulletin board. Here, information was exchanged freely within a network of individuals for (usually) the betterment of the organization. Anything “posted” to that board was easily accessible by one’s peers. Much the way weblogs today allow individuals to openly express their thoughts and ideas, so did the bulletin board.

Social media, in today’s definition, is significantly intertwined in the processes and technologies which make these types of interactions a reality. The World Wide Web has done wonders for the exchange of information, thoughts, and ideas on a global scale. So can the recent surge in social media be considered a fad, like bell-bottom jeans? Or is this really the wave of the future, a social revolution that might someday be compared to the Industrial Revolution as a critical time of change?

Here are some fascinating statistics, compiled by Socialnomics.com, which uncover how much an effect Social Media is having on our generation:

• Social Media has recently become the #1 activity on the Web
• 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via Social Media
• Years to reach 50 million users: Radio (38 years), TV (13 years), Internet (4 years), iPod (3 years), Facebook (100 million users in less than 9 months), iPod app downloads (1 billion in 9 months)
• By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers, with 96% of them having joined a social network
• More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, new stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook daily
• Companies care more now about how their social graph ranks their products and services than how Google ranks them
• 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s 4th largest
• 80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees

However, as social media continues to evolve, individual users and companies alike must discover best practices in order to take advantage of this new technology to its fullest, or else face serious repercussions. For example, lately Twitter has come under fire due to a recent study by Pear Analytics, which found that 40.55% of total tweets captured could be found to be pointless babble. The graph below also takes a stab at Twitter, condensing its community down to 100 users and classifying them on usage patterns.

In this simplified breakdown of the Twitter user base, it is easy to see that currently, very few accounts utilize Twitter in an efficient way. The majority of users seem to lack frequent updates, a pivotal part to the successful functioning of Twitter. The second largest category is “dead” accounts, where somebody had created a profile yet for one reason or another has not yet used the service. What is interesting to note is that most of the noise found on Twitter is created by a very small portion of the entire user base, yet makes up 75% of the tweets found on the service.

These two sources bring to light that, while social media can be extremely useful, it can also be abused, and extremely inefficient when not correctly utilized.

So is social media just a fad? Some naysayers definitely think so. If anything, this revolution that we are currently in will drastically alter the way individuals interact and the way companies must market themselves to consumers. No longer will direct marketing generate a positive ROI on its own. Socialnomics.com notes that 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations, while only 14% trust advertisements. Companies instead must engage consumers in conversation, spark interest in relevant communities, and not instruct consumers on what their wants and needs should be, but instead listen to them. This, in turn, will lead to a positive buzz surrounding a brand and ultimately create those valuable personal recommendations all companies strive for.