According to a study presented at a Pivot Conference (in partnership with Extra Mile Research) entitled “Marketers’ Current and Future Use of Social Media,” 63% of marketers are already investing in social media marketing, and of the 37% that are not currently investing in social media marketing, 62% are planning to invest, including 46% who plan to do so within one year.

Other key findings include:

• 57% welcome social media users involvement and participation with their brands
• Of those already investing in social media marketing, 87% plan to increase their expenditures in the next 12 months, including 56% who plan significant increases in spending.
• Only 30% of marketers who conduct social media marketing have measurement and analysis strategy fully implemented.
• 43% of marketers who conduct social media marketing have not begun implementing any measurement or analysis programs
• 30% consider their social media marketing efforts “very successful.” 59% rate their efforts as “somewhat successful.”ie 89% consider their efforts a success
• 75% of marketers consider the “always-on” 18-34 year old consumers as a primary or secondary target.
• Marketers feel that the “always-on” 18-34 year old consumers have unique characteristics:
• 70% of marketers consider them to have a shorter attention span
• 67% consider them to have different motivations than previous generations
• 59% consider them to be less accepting and more questioning of marketing messages in general

The scale of social media, and the involvement of its users, make social media a compelling platform for marketers, concludes the study, with hundreds of millions of users creating profiles and engaging in online dialogues. The study was designed to explore marketers use of social media, motivation for usage, and plans for future use as well as marketers measurement and analysis of social media programs.

The primary motivation for using social media as a marketing vehicle, says the report, is to follow customers and prospects to the sites where they are active, generating a growing understanding of the unique two-way nature of this marketing environment. Motivations to begin social media marketing  include:

• 70% say that social media marketing is a powerful tool for brands or products
• 62% feel that their prospective audience is on social media sites
• 47% note that social media users/always-on consumers gather information differently
• 40% plan to use social media as part of customer support and relationship management

To what degree are marketers embracing the “user involvement and participation” culture of social media? The study indicates user involvement with marketing campaigns and brands is welcomed by most marketers. 57% welcome user involvement enthusiastically, while another 13% seek customer involvement, but are cautious about the process and outcomes.

This week, instead of reporting from the red comfy chair in the living room, I’m reporting from sunny – if cold, Lake Tahoe – where MediaPost is hosting its first-ever Social Media Insider Summit. By day, we’ve been attending panels and keynotes about where, when, how and if employees should tweet; by night we’ve been using Google Sky Maps to figure out what the constellations are above our heads. Yes, it’s a geek-a-thon!

But since I’m not just a geek but an alleged wordsmith, one of the things that struck me is how important language is to at least some in this crowd, even if it is often communicated in 140-character bursts that often resort to abbreviations. Here’s when it struck me: when Forrester Research senior analyst Augie Ray, during a panel on privacy, walked the assembled multitudes through some language that is being used by Amazon to tell people how it would use profile data for those who connect their Amazon accounts to Facebook.

We all know what this normally looks like — it involves some form of legalese that makes leveraging one’s Facebook friends for any purpose seem to be troublesome, invasive and worth having second thoughts about.

But Amazon, by actually thinking of this language in a marketing context, managed to make the idea of linking one’s Amazon and Facebook accounts together sound useful and appealing – like you might actually want to do it. Here are some excerpts of how it explained the deal. Connecting Facebook and Amazon together would let the user:

·       “Discover Amazon recommendations for movies, music and more based on your Facebook profile.”

·       “See upcoming birthdays and find your Facebook friends’ Amazon Wish Lists more easily.”

·       “Get gift suggestions for your friends based on their Facebook profiles.”

·       “Explore your friends’ profiles and see who has similar interests.”

“Now, that’s something I could use,” a potential user might say. It also uses clear language to make clear all of the potentially troubling ways personal data will not be used.

So why I am so focused on a few sentences? Though I hadn’t really spent a lot of time thinking about it previously, much of the language used to describe privacy policy is off-putting, when it should really be part of the marketing program – telling you why you might want to do something instead of making you feel you might not.

It’s something marketers need to think about more. Amazon could have used more strictly legal language; it also could have done what most companies do when they launch a Facebook app: default to intimidating, boilerplate Facebook-ese. That’s not just lazy; it’s a bit self-defeating. While most of us in the business gleefully skim past the verbiage about what personal information an app we’re downloading has access to, many people find that verbiage to be a deterrent. Why not, as Amazon has, explain precisely what the benefits of using the app might be?

Maybe this is a topic only a linguist could love, but I think it’s about more than that. It’s part of building trust, and that’s central to what good marketing is about.

Author: Catharine P. Taylor
Via [Mediapost]

US adults 50 and older have increased their social networking use from 22% to 42% in the past year, according to data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Half of Adults 50-64 Use SocNets
Half (47%) of internet users ages 50-64 and one in four (26%) users age 65 and older now use social networking sites.

Young adult internet users ages 18-29 continue to be the heaviest users of social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, with 86% saying they use the sites.

Adults 65 and Up Double SocNet Adoption
During the past year, the growth of social networking adoption among internet users ages 18-29 paled in comparison with the gains made by older users. Between April 2009 and May 2010, internet users ages 50-64 who said they use a social networking site like MySpace, Facebook or LinkedIn grew 88%, and those ages 65 and older grew 100% in their adoption of the sites; compared with a growth rate of 13% for those ages 18-29.

Older Adults Increasingly Share Daily Updates
The use of Twitter and other services to share status updates has also grown among older users, most notably among those ages 50-64. While just 5% of users ages 50-64 had used Twitter or another status update service in 2009, 11% now say they use these tools. On a typical day, 6% of online adults ages 50-64 make Twitter a part of their routine, up from the 1% who did so in 2009.

One in five (20%) adults ages 50-64 say they use social networking sites on a typical day, up from 10% one year ago. Likewise, 13% of online adults ages 65 and older log on to social networking sites, compared with just 4% who did so in 2009.

Older Adults Maintain Interest in Email, Online News
Overall, 92% of those ages 50-64 and 89% of those ages 65 and older send or read email and more than half of each group exchanges email messages on a typical day. Online news gathering also ranks highly in the daily media habits of older adults; 76% of internet users ages 50-64 get news online, and 42% do so on a typical day. Among internet users ages 65 and older, 62% look for news online and 34% do so on a typical day.

Americans Get News on Multiple Platforms
The overwhelming majority of Americans (92%) use multiple platforms to get news on a typical day, according to other recent findings from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Americans get their news from a combination of on- and offline sources, including national TV, local TV, the internet, local newspapers, radio, and national newspapers. Six in ten Americans (59%) get news from a combination of online and offline sources on a typical day, and the internet is now the third most popular news platform, behind local television news and national television news.

Via [Marketing Charts]

Rivaling the ubiquity of Google’s search bar, Facebook on Tuesday firmly lodged itself on the front page of NYTimes.com. “The functionality appears to be similar to Facebook’s recommended articles social plugin, with users being required to opt-in to the service,” notes All Facebook.

“The most notable aspect of this new service however is that the typically design-conscious company, has a plugin which doesn’t align with the rest of the site.”

According to The New York Times, the only information that will be displayed on one’s Facebook profile is recommendations that they chose to share on Facebook. What’s more, all information being used by NYTimes.com will be explicitly stated.

What the partnership does not do is integrate Facebook with the New York Times’ existing TimesPeople social news network. Rather, as All Facebook reports, “The company has chosen to use a number of separated social tools for providing more interaction among its users.”

via [Mediapost]

If you’re an early-stage consumer internet company looking for funding from angels, seed funds or an early-stage venture capital fund, (Read VC Fred Wilson’s July post for a look at what entrepreneurs can gain from each type of funding), consider two new rules of thumb when you pitch potential investors, courtesy of Howard Morgan, a self-proclaimed super angel at First Round Capital.

Every consumer internet company needs:

#1 A Mobile Strategy — Explain clearly how your product will work on Apple’s Iphone or the Google Android.

#2 Social Media Marketing Strategy — Search Engine Optimization is passe. You need to understand and clearly articulate how you’ll leverage your brand through the social media marketing channels, i.e. Twitter, Facebook and the rapidly proliferating companion sites.

Simple rules. But important ones to remember when you’re hunting for funding from any early-stage investor.

Via [Forbes]

U.S. adults ages 50 and up who use the Internet are flocking to social networks, according to the results of a survey of 2,252 adults ages 18+ by Princeton Survey Research Associates on behalf of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The survey provides more evidence suggesting social media could become an effective advertising and marketing platform for reaching older Internet users (chronic offense-takers, please note that I did not write “old people”).

The Pew findings are pretty dramatic: Among Internet users ages 50+ overall, social network use increased from 22% in April 2009 to 42% in May 2010. To boot, 10% of the 50+ cohort uses Twitter or a similar “status update” service, either to post updates or check other people’s updates.

Looking at specific age cohorts, social network use among Internet users ages 50-64 surged from 25% to 47%, with 20% of this group saying they check into social networks on a daily basis — up from 10% last year. Meanwhile the proportion of Internet users ages 65+ using social networks doubled from 13% to 26% over this period, with the number checking in daily jumping from 4% to 13%.

By contrast, social network use among Internet users ages 18-29 appears to be reaching saturation, growing from 76% in April 2009 to 86% in May 2010.

These findings seem to jibe with some other figures Erik wrote about recently, suggesting that the overall rate of growth in social networks is slowing, but that growth could continue if social networks penetrate certain under-utilizing parts of the population — especially older adults. The pool of potential users is growing rapidly: a separate study from Pew found that the proportion of Americans ages 70-75 who were online increased from 26% in 2005 to 45% in 2009.

via [Mediapost]

Delegates and guest speakers at the 2010 London Net Promoter conference share their views on Net Promoter in this short video.

Usually, new vehicles are unveiled at big marquee auto shows in places like Detroit and L.A. But Ford seems to have done well to launch its Explorer crossover virtually, on social media.

The reveal’s physical occurrence was in the middle of New York City, on a faux hillside right in front of Macy’s. But Jumpstart Media, a Hachette Filipacchi-owned network of auto-centric Web sites, says the real jaw-dropper may have happened online.

The firm says the reveal of the 2011 Ford Explorer on Facebook caused a 104% increase in the number of people going to Ford Explorer pages in Jumpstart’s network of Web sites on July 26, the day of the unveiling.

Ford took the unusual tack of unveiling the vehicle on Facebook, and subsequently doubled the daily users researching Ford Explorer across Jumpstart’s online automotive shopping and enthusiast properties, compared to the average daily usage for the month of July, per the firm.

Jumpstart says the boom continued with successive daily improvements in usage versus the average, of 66%, 25%, 13% and 8% by July 30.

The firm says that because of engagement during the Facebook reveal, Ford got a greater share of SUV shoppers across Jumpstart’s 13 automotive shopping and enthusiast Web sites, including Vehix, Consumer Guide Automotive, JD Power Autos, Shopping.com Autos, Car and Driver, Road & Track, and U.S.News.com. The network says Ford’s share of SUV shoppers grew by 52% on the day of the unveiling to become the most-researched SUV.

Joe Kyriakoza, VP of marketing communications at Jumpstart, said in a release that the Facebook effort managed to encourage a high volume of in-market shoppers to consider Explorer. Kyriakoza says that after trailing Grand Cherokee — which also recently launched a new design for 2011 — for most of July, Explorer soared ahead of it and the rest of the competition for the remainder of the month.

Jumpstart also said the Explorer Facebook reveal did better than Super Bowl ads for other automakers. Ford outdistanced other automakers’ share-of-shopping increases the day after they had run 30-second Super Bowl commercials this year. The firm says Super Bowl auto advertisers saw average share of shopping lift by 14%. But that was less than a third of Explorer’s growth from the Facebook unveiling.

“While it’s unclear what Ford paid for the Facebook reveal, I’m confident it was nowhere near the cost of even one $2.5 million Super Bowl commercial,” said Kyriakoza. “Ford’s campaign clearly demonstrates that while traditional media can be highly effective in driving consideration, a well-executed and deeply influential online program can shift car shopping intent with immediacy and efficacy.”

via [Mediapost]

Writer and marketing guru Seth Godin doesn’t plan to publish any more books — at least not in the traditional sense.

After writing 12 books, he doesn’t think the traditional publishing process is “worth the effort,” he revealed in an interview with Mediabistro. Godin, the author of bestsellers such as Purple Cow and The Dip, has quite a bleak view on the paper book and the way we consume it.

One bit from the interview is particularly revealing. “I like the people, but I can’t abide the long wait, the filters, the big push at launch, the nudging to get people to go to a store they don’t usually visit to buy something they don’t usually buy, to get them to pay for an idea in a form that’s hard to spread,” says Godin.

I still like to visit a bookstore. But in general, I can’t shake the feeling that Godin is right: Paper books aren’t a particularly elegant way to spread an idea in the age of blogs, e-readers and social media.

“I really don’t think the process is worth the effort that it now takes to make it work. I can reach 10 or 50 times as many people electronically,” says Godin.

Do you agree? Is traditional book publishing really a thing of the past? Please share your opinion in the comments.

An experiment in protein folding shows that non-scientists came out ahead.

When a brand-new protein rolls off the ribosome assembly line within a cell, it’s basically just a strip of amino acids in a pre-determined sequence. It then quickly bends, twists and folds itself into a convoluted shape, the same one every time. This final folded shape is determined by…no one knows.

Some of the basic rules are clear, but most of them are not. Despite 45 years of vigorous research, we have only the dimmest understanding of protein folding, despite the fact that we’d really like to know more. As Joachim Pietzsch writes, “Of all the molecules found in living organisms, proteins are the most important. They are used to support the skeleton, control senses, move muscles, digest food, defend against infections and process emotions.” Because they’re so vital, we’d love to know more about what makes them tick (or, in this case, form).

So why not use computers to simulate the folding process, thereby gaining a better understanding? Why not write an application that takes a given protein’s fresh-off-the-assembly line shape, applies all known folding rules to it, and tests to see which ones get the molecule into its final (known) shape? Programs like Rosetta do exactly this, but they run up against a nasty problem: Even simple proteins are so complex that the fastest simulations can’t test all possibilities.

Rosetta and other protein-folding algorithms do much better than simple trial and error; they incorporate all the rules and “tricks” that we know about. But as Pietzsch writes, “Any realistic hope of cracking the folding code… is probably a very long way off.”

If the smartest biochemists and fastest computers have made so little progress on this bitterly difficult problem over half a century, it seems ludicrous to think that novices will be able to contribute much. But a paper published earlier this month (pdf) in Natureshows that amateurs can fold proteins better than anyone or anything else when they’re given the right training and incentives, and when they’re given digital tools that allow them to experiment, collaborate and self-organize.

A few years back a team at the University of Washington took cues from both the phenomenon of massively multiplayer online role playing games and the concept of crowdsourcing scientific problems and developed Foldit, a protein folding game. Foldit presents protein folding as a visual or spatial challenge to the player, whose goal is basically to arrange an on-screen protein into the smallest possible shape that obeys all the game’s rules.

A set of starter puzzles familiarize players with the game’s interface, rules and solving aids. After completing these, players are ready to tackle actual proteins. As they do so, they can work alone or join groups, many of which are open to all comers. They can also read and contribute to a wiki about the game and its strategy.

Players strive to get high scores on each puzzle; since correctly folded proteins are in the lowest possible energy state, a players’ Foldit scores are the opposite of the energy of the molecule they’ve created. Keeping score, of course, leads to rivalry and competition as people and groups strive to outdo each other and be recognized as the best at the game. There are no cash rewards.

The first public beta Foldit downloads became available in May 2008, and since then more than 57,000 people have played the game. How well are they doing? The Nature paper reports the results of 10 blind challenges–prediction puzzles involving proteins whose final, folded shapes were known to the paper’s authors but not “contained within publicly available databases for the duration of the puzzles.”

As the authors write, “we hypothesized that human spatial reasoning could improve both the sampling of conformational space and the determination of when to pursue suboptimal conformations if the [random elements of current algorithms] were replaced with human decision making while retaining the deterministic Rosetta algorithms as [tools for players].”

Was this hypothesis correct? In three of the 10 challenges the best Foldit players and the best current simulations performed similarly–that is, the two approaches got about equally close to the final folded shape of the protein. In five other challenges, the best result from Foldit was substantially better than the best a superfast computer alone could do. In only two of the 10 cases did the simulation do substantially better. These appeared to be the two hardest puzzles; neither Foldit players nor computers alone were able to get very close to the correct shape.

What explains this astonishing result?

How can it be that crowds of people playing a game on desktop computers do better at this important task than supercomputers programmed by super scientists?

Are the scientists themselves the ones playing Foldit? Maybe, but they’re not the best at it; none of the five highest-scoring players took chemistry classes beyond high school.

The team behind Foldit realized that even “normal” people have a number of interesting attributes that make us well-suited to tackle protein folding challenges.

–We are particularly strong at spatial reasoning, or literally seeing solutions. As is the case with all primates, a substantial portion of our brains is devoted to processing visual signals. This means that when a puzzle is posed to us in spatial terms, we can apply a lot of our cranial horsepower to it. And protein folding is, at its heart, the work of folding an initial shape into a smaller shape.

–We have intuition, especially after lots of experience in a given domain like Foldit. We develop a sixth sense for smart moves in the game, and even though most of us couldn’t explain where the idea for a particularly far out move came from, protein folding seems often to rely on such moves. It’s very hard to program computers to make intelligent-yet-far-out moves. We can program in randomness (and the best protein folding programs do just that), but it’s hard if not impossible to program in smart, intuitive randomness. As the Nature team writes, “We found that Foldit players were particularly adept at solving puzzles requiring substantial backbone remodeling… stochastic Monte Carlo trajectories [in other words, random computer guesses] are unlikely to [find] the coordinated backbone… shifts needed…”

–We have great adaptivity. We can change our strategies and approaches over time based on what we learn and intuit about what’s working well, and what’s not. The Nature paper has some cool graphs showing how people change their mix of Foldit “moves” after the first hour, first day, and first week of playing. Again, it’s hard to program computers to do this well.

–In addition to being highly visual, we humans also inherently tend toward collaboration. We form teams and share knowledge among members pretty effectively, thanks to the gift of language. Many scholars believe that is what most fundamentally separates us from all other animals. And technologies like wikis are a big step forward in facilitating collaboration within geographically dispersed groups.

–While collaborating, we exercise a high degree of self-organization. The Foldit researchers found that, “Within teams, there is often a division of labor. Some players specialize in early-stage openings, others in middle- and end-game polishing.” I would bet that these roles were not assigned by team captains; instead, people fell into them unconsciously over time, and also fell into effective workflows and divisions of labor within teams. This is exactly what’s happened with Wikipedia, and I’d be surprised if the situation were radically different within Foldit.

–Finally, we love competition. The desire to get ahead of a rival or be on the game’s leader board can be a powerful motivation. Foldit’s designers did a great job of tapping into this motivation. They also made the game engaging to play and provided frequent feedback to players, thereby increasing intrinsic motivation as well.

Taking advantage of all these features simultaneously led to better outcomes in the dauntingly difficult domain of protein folding. By studying what people did to rack up high scores in Foldit, we may be able to improve how well computers alone work in this domain. As the authors write, “More in-depth analysis of player strategies should provide further insight … and could lead to improved automation algorithms for protein structure prediction.” I’ll go a big step beyond that statement: It could be that studying how people succeed at Foldit might help us better understand not only computer simulation of protein folding, but perhaps also protein folding itself.

The Foldit team did science that was both rigorous and creative, and they deserve at least as much attention they’re getting. They also deserve credit for realizing that when faced with a nasty problem, the smart approach is not always to retrench–to rely more heavily on established experts and powerful computers.

Instead, when the tools needed for effective problem solving can be widely and cheaply distributed, the responsibility for problem solving can also be. And as Foldit results and lots of other evidence shows, expertise–for problem solving, innovation, etc.–is emergent. It’s out there in large quantities, and in hard-to-predict places. A problem solving approach that lets pockets of enthusiasm and expertise manifest themselves and find each other can yield surprisingly large rewards, even in the unlikeliest places.