Checking Facebook made people feel worse about both issues, and the more they browsed, the worse they felt, the University of Michigan research said.

via BBC News – Facebook use 'makes people feel worse about themselves'.

Marketers operating in the business-to-business B2B realm have seen a steady uptick in dollars dedicated to marketing over the past year. According to April 2013 research from American Business Media ABM, a B2B industry association, 29% of US marketers reported increasing their B2B advertising budgets over the preceding 12 months, while 59% said outlays had remained about the same. Only 9% indicated they had decreased at all.

via B2B Marketers Expect a Bump in Ad Budgets in the Next Year – eMarketer.

Part of the reason Facebook is losing my generation’s attention is the fact that there are other networks now. When I was 10, I wasn’t old enough to have a Facebook. But a magical thing called Instagram had just come out … and our parents had no idea there was an age limit. Rapidly, all my friends got Instagrams.

via I’m 13 and None of My Friends Use Facebook.

clip_image002The co-author of Influence Marketing, Danny Brown asked this question in a recent blog post: What’s the future of influence marketing? Brown goes on to outline in an infographic how agencies and brands are doing influencer marketing and how social scoring will most likely be replaced by return on investment (ROI) and performance metrics. Brown raises an important question, so I’ve decided to dig a little deeper to understand how the best are doing influencer marketing today, and to zero in on any performance metrics that may exist today.

via 8 Of The Best Influencer Marketing Campaigns From 8 Hot Agencies – Forbes.

The number of adults who use social networks is up to 72 percent in 2013, according to data from Pew Research Center. This is up 5 percent from last year and 64 percent since 2005 when Pew first started studying social adoption.

via Social Media Usage Amongst Older Generations Triples, According to Pew | ClickZ.

ABM-B2B-Marketers-Most-Successful-Platforms-Aug2013A recent survey [pdf] from ABM asked B2B media users which media types they rely on for decision-making. The study also contains some interesting results from the marketer side: which platforms do they think are most successful in creating awareness among existing customers and generating targeted leads of prospective new buyers? It turns out there’s quite a bit of consensus: face-to-face event attendance is rated the most successful platform, by a fairly wide margin.

via B2B Marketers Rank the Best Platforms for Reaching Customers and Prospects.

Teradata-Data-Collected-Used-To-Drive-Marketing-Aug201345% of global marketers agree that data is the most underutilized asset in their organization, per survey results [download page] from Teradata. Indeed, while a majority currently collect a range of data types, including demographic 80%, customer service 72% and customer satisfaction 62%, fewer report using the data. And although marketers ascribe various benefits to the use of data in decision-making, the study shows that few are able to systematically apply a data-driven marketing approach to regular tasks.

via Marketers Are Collecting Data – But Having Trouble Leveraging It.

Good writing: Businesses claim to practice it, support it, and value it. But more often than not, their money isn’t where their mouth is. Poor grammar and jargon-riddled writing are rampant. We’re great at inventing terms — the instruction manual for my toaster refers to the lever that pops up the toast as the ‘Extra-Lift Carriage Control Lever’ — but poor at communicating what we actually mean.

via Your Company Is Only as Good as Your Writing – Kyle Wiens – Harvard Business Review.

A new style guide on the www.gov.uk website warns against “vague” jargon and buzzwords as well as using too many metaphors in government announcements.

Agenda, dialogue, empower and utilise are among the phrases to be avoided.

via BBC News – Driving out jargon: Whitehall’s new vocabulary.

On first glance, it might seem possible to sum up the global social network landscape in a single word: Facebook. With almost 1.1 billion users expected by the end of 2013, Facebook has become the top social network in nearly every country in the world except China and Russia. However, it is far from the only social network internet users worldwide access. Even with a clear leader, the global landscape is too complex to be summed up with a single site, according to a new eMarketer report, “The Global Social Network Landscape: A Country-by-Country Guide to Social Network Usage.”

via What Are Some Key Differences in Social Activity Around the World? – eMarketer.