Creating a community is the new hot trend that’s been around for decades, Google+ reinvented it with the launch of communities in January of this year. For me the concept of “community” started when I got my first taste of user groups when I worked for Apple—speaking at their meetings was one of my great pleasures. Their members were unpaid, raging, inexorable thunderlizard evangelists for Macintosh and Apple II.

via The Art of Creating a Community | LinkedIn.

It can be difficult to measure small changes in delivery because there are seasonal trends in email. Heck, there are hourly trends in email. As you might suspect, Gmail opens do follow these hourly, weekly, and seasonal trends, but on the whole they remain fairly steady. With that settled, I trimmed my data to a lean 6 weeks around the introduction of tabs. That’s about 1.5 billion emails, which is plenty of records for a good analysis.

via How Gmail’s New Inbox Is Affecting Open Rates | MailChimp Email Marketing Blog.

AvidOvum-Why-Watching-TV-Ads-July2013In an age of growing DVR use (sometimes in order to skip commercials) and increasingly multi-tasking behavior (with mobile owners spending perhaps an estimated one-third of their ad viewing time looking at their devices), Avid and Ovum set out to ask TV audiences why they continue to watch TV ads. Based on an online survey [download page] of more than 3,000 consumers across the US, UK, Germany, and Brazil, the researchers found that viewer passivity appears to be a bigger factor than the ad creative itself.

via Why Are TV Viewers Watching Ads? Not Because They’re Entertaining.

ShareThis-Social-Sharing-Propensity-by-Device-July2013Consumers are more social on mobile devices than on desktops, declares ShareThis, as the result of its new study comparing 4.9 billion social signals on the desktop web against 1.2 billion signals on the mobile web. The data, aggregated from the 2.3 million sites in the ShareThis network which reached 87% of online Americans in June, indicates that sharing propensity is almost twice as high among mobile users than desktop users.

via Social Sharing Behavior Said More Prevalent on Mobiles Than Desktops.

ACSI-Customer-Sat-Social-Media-Sites-2013-v-2012-July2013The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) has released its annual look at the “e-business” sector, which consists of ratings for social media sites, portals and search engines, and online news and information sites. And this year the news isn’t good. The social media category saw its overall score fall a point to 68 on ACSI’s 100-point scale, a reading that puts it above only internet service providers (ISPs) and on par with the chronically low-rated TV service providers. And while search engines and portals scored higher, their aggregate reading saw a significant drop.

via Social Media Sites, Search Engines Ranked by Visitor Satisfaction.

Reply.com-Local-Merchants-Leading-Online-Marketing-Challenges-July2013A survey of local merchants around the US conducted by Reply.com reveals that a plurality 40% are spending 5 or more hours a week on marketing their businesses, but that the vast majority either have a single person (51%) or no-one at all (37%) managing or supervising their digital marketing programs and initiatives. With few internal resources to draw upon, merchants indicate that the biggest challenge they face with online marketing is that there are too many channels to address, a problem cited by 24% of respondents.

via Local Merchants Overwhelmed by the Array of Available Digital Marketing Channels.

Forrester-B2B-Decision-Maker-Use-Social-Media-July2013Social media use is ubiquitous among B2B decision-makers in North America and Europe, according to [download page] results from a newly-released Forrester Research study. That said, their motivations for using various platforms differs greatly, and understanding those patterns is a crucial element for figuring out appropriate marketing strategies. The data suggests that among popular sites, Facebook is rarely used primarily for business purposes, while Google+ and Pinterest are still lagging in adoption rates overall.

via How B2B Decision-Makers Are Using Social Media.

Facebook has made big changes to the way brands and users interact. Over the past few months, Facebook has redesigned the News Feed to improve how visual content is displayed and introduced clickable hashtags giving context to user posts.

In our new report, we analyze activity from the Top 100 Brands in the world, with some pretty interesting findings. Check it out:

via Facebook Study: Hashtags, Engagement Rates & Content Analysis | Simply Measured.

User management platform Janrain has studied for several years social network users’ preferences regarding social sign-in on other publishers’ sites. Social sign-in has proved important to a variety of publishers, including media and entertainment sites that want to encourage sharing, as well as retailers that want to boost conversions by making checkout as seamless as possible.

via Variety of Sign-In Options Still Key for Social Logins – eMarketer.

Forrester-B2B-Decision-Maker-Use-Social-Media-July2013Social media use is ubiquitous among B2B decision-makers in North America and Europe, according to [download page] results from a newly-released Forrester Research study. That said, their motivations for using various platforms differs greatly, and understanding those patterns is a crucial element for figuring out appropriate marketing strategies. The data suggests that among popular sites, Facebook is rarely used primarily for business purposes, while Google+ and Pinterest are still lagging in adoption rates overall.

via How B2B Decision-Makers Are Using Social Media.