For some reason the good people at Eloqua and JESS3 have decided to feature this blog in their blog tree – 60 blogs that they call “the freshest voices on the web.”

This site shares the tree with the likes of the Instagram blog, and so I am not really sure the accolade is deserved, especially since I post less than I used to.   However, it has led me to all sorts of good content and blogs I hadn’t heard of before, which is always a bonus.   In fact, I’ve compiled all sixty sites into a tab on my netvibes page.

As I had to add them manually they are in a pretty random order for now, but hope you find it useful as a discovery resource (and if you are one of the other 59 and you are not on there, let me know!)

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According to Emarketer, “more than half of retailers felt they had been pushed into using social media because more consumers were using it as a primary shopping vehicle.” The second most important reason is that the competition is doing it – and noone wants to be last in this space.

The most important social media tools were “social networks” at 85% (what about the other 15%?), micro-blogging – so Twitter (51%), and blogs (43%).

The Aberdeen Group says that there is some confusion about how to measure social media activity, but in fact the table below seems sensible to me:  Quality of customer insights (43%) is above quality (36%) and quantity (31%) of new sales leads, which points to retailers understanding social media a bit better than what the Aberdeen Group report implies.

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Conducted among US Internet consumers, the study showed that 27% of subscribers to an email newsletter were more likely to purchase from a brand while 37% of Twittewr users were.

Meanwhile less than one in five Facebook brand fans (17%) said they were more likely to buy – a surprise considering that 49% disagreed with that statement (which is obviously not the same as saying that they were less likely to make a purchase).

Exact Target has produced a handy chart showing that while Twitter has the lowest reach, it provides the greatest opportunities for customer acquisition.   However, it’s email subscribers who are the most interested in getting discounts, promotions or freebies.

Finally, it’s worth looking at who conducted the survey.

Exact Target is an email marketing system, and Co Tweet is a Twitter management tool…no Facebook app developers involved in the study then.   I’m not suggesting the data is wrong.

A lot of it is definitely interesting, and personally I am a big Twitter fan, but you do wonder if some of the questions were skewed to produce a certain result.

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• Despite Fanfare, Only 3% of General Public Use Twitter for News (socialtimes.com)

A common answer to ‘why Twitter, it’s not a mass market tool?’, is ‘because the people who do use it matter.’ The influence over numbers argument.

That’s backed up by an ExactTarget study, reproduced in emarketer. US Twitter users in April 2010 were far more likely than general Internet users to post to forums (75% vs 25%), blog (72% vs 14%), comment on blogs (70% vs 23%) and post ratings / reviews (61% vs 20%).

In other words, the 14 million odd people who regularly go on Twitter (as opposed to the 95 million that have signed up), are already active in social media, know how to make things happen and to create noise – good or bad – online, and take conversations elsewhere, be that to blogs, forums, other social networks, or even the mainstream media.

As Morgan Stewart of ExactTarget puts it, “What happens on Twitter doesn’t stay on Twitter. While the number of active Twitter users is less than Facebook or email, the concentration of highly engaged and influential content creators is unrivaled—it’s become the gathering place for content creators whose influence spills over into every other corner of the internet.”

ExactTarget also asked Twitter users why they followed brands. The biggest reason was for informational purposes, with updates on future brands (38%) and keeping informed about the company (32%) being the main reasons.

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Perhaps not surprisingly most bloggers are in their 20s and 30s, only 7%+ are aged 50 or more

The highest % of bloggers (29.2%) are in the US, the second most populated country in the blogosphere is the UK with 6.75% of the total

What does surprise me is the gender split.

Sysomos says that 49.1% of bloggers are women….yet this contradicts both received wisdom and the state of the blogosphere report by Technorati last Autumn, which showed that 2/3 of bloggers are male.

How did Sysomos come up with such a different result?  Is it that Syomos products only analyse blogs where there is a clear and declared biography, while Technorati’s research is more of a conventional survey (i.e one carried out and answered by humans).

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A study by George Washington University and Cision found that 89% of journalists turn to blogs for research, 65% to social media sites like Facebook, 52% to Twitter.   And Wikipedia?  Over 6/10 (61%) consult it.

Overall 55% of journalists thought that social media was either somewhat or very important.   However, at the same time 84% said it was ‘slightly less’ or ‘much less’ reliable than traditional media.

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First of all, most are discovered within two weeks of them being posted up.    If your video hasn’t gathered viral momentum in the first ten days or so of it going online, it probably won’t.

55% of video views are via “discovery”, people stumble on the video, mostly via blogs.   Get that online PR campaign going!

Then, after two minutes, over 3/4 of your audience will have zoned out and clicked somewhere else.   So keep those virals short.

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This is according to the UK’s media recruitment agencies as reported by industry publication PR Week.

Recruiter Major Players looked through 4500 CVs received in the past two years (4500?  Guess times really were tough!), only 6% mentioned social media, 9% mentioned twitter and 2% mentioned blogging.   13% said ‘Facebook’ though a lot of this was as an interest or hobby.

By comparison, 33% of recruitment searches are for positions that require digital skills and another 28% require at least a general understanding.

In the article, the CEO of Cake turns the situation on its head a little bit implying that there are plenty of people, especially the under 25s, who use social media but that there’s a “dearth of strategy and planning people.”   In other words, sure you ‘use’ social media, but can you marry that up with a basis in communications strategy and skills.

Image – Justin Cormack

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On a more serious note, the study does show that, despite the increased uptake of social networks by older online consumers, they by and large still have a more focused attitude to the Internet.   They go there for a specific task, to find out information, check finances, read the news and so on.

More specifically us generation-Xers (33-44) are still the Kings of online shopping with 80% buying stuff online compared to 71% of generation Y (18-32) and only 38% of teens.

By comparison, as you’d expect digital natives (aged under 30) are more likely to use personal blogs, send instant messages and check out online videos and games.   In other words, the generational divide is a functional versus social one.

Another study, from iStrategy labs, looks specifically at Facebook.   The 35-54 year old one is the fastest growing demographic, while the number of 25-34 year olds doubles every six months.

Image – Tom Coates

Graham Holliday who blogs from Rwanda has published this excellent presentation about he disseminates information using free tools and a patchy, expensive Internet connection.

As they say necessity is the mother of invention and Graham has found some simple, but effective ways of getting the word out.   Definitely worth a read through and something the more broadband rich among us can learn from.

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