Social Media Marketing is now getting a lot of interest, not just from the companies operating at the edge but by some mainstream brands. Given this level of interest it is important to determine if the hype is matching the rhetoric and give you the facts should you want to make the case for your own company’s involvement.

The Society for New Communications Research recently published their report titled, “New Media, New Influencers & Implications for Public Relations” that provides several case studies illustrating how social media has benefited organizations like the American Red Cross, the Mayo Clinic and Quicken Loans. Among their findings, “Social media is rapidly becoming a core channel for disseminating information. Fifty-seven percent of this group of early social media adopters reported that social media tools are becoming more valuable to their activities, while 27% reported that social media is a core element of their communications strategy.”

Real Fresh TV has been conducting a study of social media usage amongst FTSE 100 companies in the UK. The website has some interesting information about the largest UK companies and their adoption of social media. I will continue to review and give commentary once the findings become clearer.

Another report that is doing the rounds in the blogoshere is the Universal McCann’s Social Media Research Wave 3 research report. As a summary, this report looked at 17,000 Internet users in 29 countries. One finding in this study was that social media can have a dramatic impact on your brand’s reputation. “34% post opinions about products and brands on their blog and 36% think more positively about companies that have blogs.”

The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research recently released the results on the usage of social media in the Inc. 500. Of note here, “Just over one quarter of the Inc. 500 reported social media was very important to their business/marketing strategy in 2007. That number has increased to 44% just one year later.”

Comscore released a report the growth of social networking worldwide. This report stated that social networking use grew 25% year over year worldwide, with significant increases in Europe and the Middle East.

Moreover, Rapleaf released the results of their study examining the gender and age of social network users. Note that these two studies were conducted independent of each other, so don’t confuse the results between them.

Chris Kenton wrote a post called, New Social Media Marketing Adoption Report where he provided a marketing whitepaper entitled “12 Essential Tips for Success in Social Media. This report showed a clear acceleration in adoption of social media as a marketing practice, and is fairly balanced about its value and application, despite all the frothy hype and counter-hype in business reporting.

Anyone that has additional reports then please post the links in the comments section for others to review and feedback.

The recent focus for Internet advertising has been on direct response advertising, where direct marketers have leveraged the internet’s ability to track consumer behavior and infer purchase intent to deliver relevant one-to-one marketing. As example, the  paid ads next to search results. But there is more to Internet advertising than the CPC text ad…… What about brand advertising? Social networks (facebook, myspace to name some examples) and blogs have begun unlocking the interactive/social nature of the Internet, but taking full advantage of this interactivity and online communication remains a huge untapped opportunity for advertisers.

Although social networks have traditionally struggled to effectively monetize their inventory, the emergence of scalable, engaging brand advertising driven by consumer data could go a long way towards helping such large web companies make the most of their online audience. The advertising world is starting to realize this.

There is growing agreement among marketers that we are moving towards  three key principles that will shape the future of online advertising are:

1) Companies are beginning to realize that advertising is both a science (relevance) and an art (engagement)

2) Data is becoming more important than ever, and

3) The market will see an increasing level of co-opetition between advertisers, agencies, ad networks and publishers.

Internet Advertising lends itself to becoming a complex/simple math problem. With the right set of data, algorithms and targeting, it’s possible to create the most value possible by serving the right ad to the right person regardless of where they happen to be on the Web.

However, these ideas do not address the advertising intent which is another set of complexities. We would need to build in understandings of the advertisers goals and what audience segment they wanted to reach, and when they wanted to reach them. Another Blog enter down the track……