86% of B2C marketers are using content marketing, and the vast majority of those (84%) are leveraging social media (other than blogs), finds a new report from the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and MarketingProfs. That puts social media on par with website articles as the most-used content marketing tactic by B2C marketers. Social gets the nod over articles for effectiveness, though: 57% rate their use of social media as “effective” or “very effective,” compared to 53% for website articles.

via B2C Content Marketers Put Social To Work, Report Good Results.

For years, LinkedIn has offered recommendations as a way to get support from fellow professionals and businesses. If you received recommendations from other individuals, you garnered credibility, and were more likely to show up in searches. But now, LinkedIn’s endorsements are much easier to get. It takes someone seconds to vouch for one or more of your particular skills, versus the 10 minutes to 15 minutes a recommendation might take. In today’s time-starved world, this is a critical difference. LinkedIn hasn’t released numbers yet, but if you look at several profiles, it’s clear that in just a few weeks, many users have generated way more endorsements than five years worth of recommendations.

via LinkedIn Endorsements Changes Everything. Here’s Why | Inc.com.

While 19% of Americans are eager to be among the first to try new technology products and services, the remaining 81% prefer to wait for those products and services to catch on, according to November 2012 findings from Ipsos. This puts Americans well below the global average of 25% who prefer to be early adopters. Predictably, younger Americans are the most avid early adopters.24% of those under aged 18-35 want to be first in line, but the 35-49 age group is not far behind, at 22%. Just 12% of the 50-64 segment consider themselves rapid adopters.

via 1 in 5 Americans Consider Themselves Early Tech Adopters.

A majority of online adults find advertising that appears as content so-called “native ads” to be misleading, according to survey results released in November 2012 by MediaBrix. They feel most deceived by sponsored video ads, with 86% reporting they find those ads misleading. 57% feel similarly about Facebook Sponsored Stories, and 45% about Twitter Promoted Tweets.Their ire is not for digital media alone. 66% feel misled by advertorials sponsored editorial, which appears both online and in print, and 61% by TV infomercials.

via Consumers Feel Duped By Sponsored Video Ads, Facebook Sponsored Stories.

The European press got itself in a bitter battle against Google. In a nutshell, legacy media want money from the search engine: first, for the snippets of news it grabs and feeds into its Google News service; second, on a broader basis, for all the referencing Google builds with news media material. In Germany, the Bundestag is working on a bill to force all news aggregators to pay their toll; in France, the executive is pushing for a negotiated solution before year-end. Italy is more or less following the same path. For a detailed and balanced background, see this Eric Pfanner story in the International Herald Tribune.In the controversy, an argument keeps rearing its head. According to the proponents of a “Google Tax”, media contents greatly improve the contextualization of advertising. Therefore, the search engine giant ought to pay for such value. Financially speaking, without media articles Google would not perform as well it does, hence the European media hunt for a piece of the pie.Last week, rooting for facts, I spoke with several people possessing deep knowledge of Google’s inner mechanics; they ranged from Search Engine Marketing specialists to a Stanford Computer Science professor who taught Larry Page and Sergey Brin back in the mid-90′s.

via The press, Google, its algorithm, their scale | Monday Note.

Facebook leads all site categories along with mobile

Facebook hasn’t always been the most popular service offering social sign-ins to other sites. But it claimed the first-place mantle over a year ago and has continued to strengthen its hold across more categories of sites, according to user management platform provider Janrain.

Media sites provide a particularly stark example. At the end of 2009, fewer than a third of social network users worldwide who used social sign-ins preferred Facebook. By Q3 2012, the percentage was up to 53%, compared with an essentially unchanged 21% share for Google and a dramatically lower 11% Yahoo! share.

via Facebook Solidifies Hold on Social Sign-Ins – eMarketer.

More than one in six visitors to travel sites are also Pinterest usersBecause of its visually oriented interface, Pinterest has been touted as having more promise for travel marketers than other emerging social media sites and even some of the established ones. Another reason travel marketers have their eye on Pinterest—besides its massive growth rate—stems from an assumption not unique to travel: The site’s users are much more likely to be in shopping mode than other social network users.

via Pinterest Users Show Proclivity for Travel Content – eMarketer.

I recently attended an event with a large number of advertising executives. All of them are coming to grips with the change from the era of push media to the era of social media, which might more properly be called “pull media.” At its core, the social revolution allows people to consume what they want, when they want, and largely on the recommendation of friends and other non-professional influencers. Attempt to graft old models onto it and you are doomed to struggle; find models that are native to the medium and you will thrive.

At O’Reilly, we first learned this lesson in 1992, when we published The Whole Internet User’s Guide and Catalog, the first popular book about the Internet, and the first to cover the as-yet undiscovered World Wide Web. (When we published the book, there were only about 200 websites, and the first web conference which we convened, “the World Wide Web Wizards Workshop” had thirty attendees, albeit among them such later luminaries as Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreesen.) We had the great good fortune to hire Brian Erwin, formerly the head of activism for the Sierra Club, to help us with our PR and marketing.

“People don’t care about your book,” I remember Brian saying to me. “They care about the Internet itself.” Instead of marketing the book, we used the book to market the Internet. And we used the native tools of the Internet (at the time, principally mailing lists and usenet newsgroups) to find people who were also evangelical about the power of the Internet, and offered them free copies of the book to help with their evangelism. The book sold over a million copies, and was selected by the New York Public Library as one of the most significant books of the 20th century.

via It’s Not About You: The Truth About Social Media Marketing | LinkedIn.

Although some brands over the years have been skeptical about how social media can bring in revenue, a new infographic reveals social commerce sales are expected to bring in $30 billion each year by 2015, with half of web sales to occur through social media.

Cloud marketing software provider Vocus has put together an infographic with stats from Gartner Research highlighting how brands are currently using social media and what trends are on the horizon.

via 50% of Web Sales to Occur Via Social Media by 2015 [INFOGRAPHIC].

Researchers at MIT say they’ve created an algorithm for Twitter that predicts trending topics better than the site’s existing equation.

Associate Professor Devavrat Shah and student Stanislav Nikolov say their new algorithm predicts trending topics with 95% accuracy an average of 90 minutes faster than Twitter — sometimes, as early as five hours before.

via Researchers Predict Twitter Trends With 95% Accuracy [STUDY].