According to a new eMarketer report, “Worldwide Social Network Users: 2013 Forecast and Comparative Estimates,” nearly one in four people worldwide will use social networks in 2013. The number of social network users around the world will rise from 1.47 billion in 2012 to 1.73 billion this year, an 18% increase. By 2017, the global social network audience will total 2.55 billion.
via Social Networking Reaches Nearly One in Four Around the World – eMarketer.
Mobile traffic is becoming increasingly significant for the travel industry, and hotels in particular. Google predicted that US hotel searches would be up 24% in 2013 overall, but that includes a 68% uptick in searches from mobile devices against a 4% decrease in desktop queries. Searches from tablets, in particular, were expected to increase by 180%.
via Tablets Grab Significant Share of Travel Traffic – eMarketer.
Adobe-Consumer-Attitudes-Online-Data-Collection-Privacy-June2013Consumers around the world generally find website customization to be of some value, with 33% of respondents to a new Adobe and Edelman Berland survey attributing some value to personalized product and service recommendations on websites, compared to 26% seeing little to no value. But, privacy concerns abound, according to the study, with 84% agreeing that there are too many technologies tracking and analyzing behavior and 82% agreeing that companies collect too much information on consumers. Some practices simply cross over from customization to an invasion of privacy: 79% feel that way about their information being collected without them knowing it.
via Where Consumers Draw The Line With Personal Data Collection.
CRE-Reasons-for-Watching-TV-Shows-June2013Few viewers are drawn to TV shows because they saw something about them on social media, finds the Council for Research Excellence CRE in a new study [pdf], and despite the buzz about social TV, daily interaction with social media concerning TV is still relegated to a small minority of consumers. But, the study finds there is significant room for growth: the proportion of study respondents who interact with TV-related content on social media on at least a weekly basis is triple those who do so on a daily basis 37% vs. 12%, and the data also shows that social plays a bigger role in drawing viewers to new than existing shows.
I’m going to keep this brief, because you’re not going to stick around for long. I’ve already lost a bunch of you. For every 161 people who landed on this page, about 61 of you—38 percent—are already gone. You “bounced” in Web traffic jargon, meaning you spent no time “engaging” with this page at all.So now there are 100 of you left. Nice round number. But not for long! We’re at the point in the page where you have to scroll to see more. Of the 100 of you who didn’t bounce, five are never going to scroll. Bye!OK, fine, good riddance. So we’re 95 now. A friendly, intimate crowd, just the people who want to be here. Thanks for reading, folks! I was beginning to worry about your attention span, even your intellig … wait a second, where are you guys going? You’re tweeting a link to this article already? You haven’t even read it yet! What if I go on to advocate something truly awful, like a constitutional amendment requiring that we all type two spaces after a period?Wait, hold on, now you guys are leaving too? You’re going off to comment? Come on! There’s nothing to say yet. I haven’t even gotten to the nut graph.
via How people read online: Why you won’t finish this article. – Slate Magazine.
PwC has issued its annual “Entertainment & Media Outlook” report, which contains projections for online and offline media markets through 2017 across various components including advertising revenues and consumer spending. The outlook for traditional media markets is similar to previous forecasts in that TV and out-of-home advertising have the healthiest future, while radio continues to grow at a modest pace and the outlook for print continues to be dim, although losses may slow.
PwC-Global-Entertainment-Media-Content-Spending-Shift-June2013Consumer spending on entertainment and media content is moving away from physical purchases, and that shift will only intensify over the next 5 years, according to the latest “Global entertainment and media (E&M) outlook,” from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). While physical purchases represented 88% of total spending on E&M content in 2008, that number has dropped to 73% this year, and will fall to 53% by 2017. That mirrors an overall spending transition in the global E&M market.
via Global Spending on Entertainment and Media Shifting Away From Physical Content.
Despite all the hoopla that surrounded the new social site when it was first released, many businesses are ignoring Google Plus completely in exchange for increased focus on sites like Facebook and Twitter. While 72 of the world’s largest 100 brands have a Google Plus page, nearly 40 percent of them haven’t posted any content on the site. But when you consider that Google Plus is the brainchild of the world’s most powerful search engine, is it really the brightest strategy to ignore Google Plus for business?
via Why You Can No Longer Afford to Ignore Google Plus for Business.
I hope this is just a phase and it will go over, untill then I am readonly on YouTube, they have in my opinion the most healthy social community right now, I assume because there are so many young people using it. And I still have hopes for Blogs as a decentralized way of communicating more mature ideas in longer posts. I kind of think losing Google Reader was the best thing which could happen to the Blog/RSS Feed community because it got quite a kick and new services are arising and people seem to blog more and more interesting stuff as before. There seems even to be a trend to cleaner design which I love and why I tried to clean up my design here too as you can see.
via Social seems broken; in almost all services – jeena.net.
WeberShandwick-Reasons-CEOs-Don’t-Participate-in-Social-June2013Senior executives whose CEOs use social media are extremely positive about the effects of their CEOs’ actions, per results from a study [pdf] by Weber Shandwick. However, many CEOs haven’t made the move to social media use yet, and the study results indicate that perceived risk is a key impediment. Senior executives with “unsocial” CEOs were asked the reasons why their CEO does not participate in social media, with almost one-third responding that it’s too risky. That was one of the top barriers, slightly behind social not being typical for the region or industry (35%), the CEO seeing no measurable return on investment (34%), and a lack of demand for the CEO to do so (34%).