C-suite executives are increasingly convinced of the benefits of engaging with their customers on social media platforms. A February 2012 survey of 329 senior executives in North America by management and digital consulting firm PulsePoint Group and the Economist Intelligence Unit found that the vast majority of companies who had invested in social media saw a positive shift in their bottom line as a result.Executives who said their companies had established an extensive social media presence reported a return on investment that was more than four times that of companies with little or no social network engagement activity.

via For Brands, Social Media Shows Returns but Measurement Hurdles Remain – eMarketer.

Could Pinterest be the silver bullet for retailers on social media? Pinterest is clearly resonating with online consumers in a big way. To put it simply, customers who find a product via Pinterest are more likely to purchase it than those who find the product via other social networks.

via Interest in Pinterest Reaches a Fever Pitch [INFOGRAPHIC].

The average Google ranking of a URL is highly correlated with the number of Tweets about that URL, says Branded3 [download page] in an April 2012 report, though close examination of the report reveals that other factors could have a major role in the report’s conclusions. The company looked at data gleaned from its Twitition website, in which users who sign a Twitition have a tweet automatically sent from their account. With a sample size of 8,528 Twititions collected on February 28, 2012, and having gathered the rankings on April 6, the company found that URLs with over 500 signatures (tweets) had an average ranking of 46. The average ranking improved to 41 for those with over 1,000 signatures, 31 for those with over 5,000 signatures, and 5 for those with over 7,500 signatures.

via URL Tweet Volume and Google Ranking Said Correlated.

After its growth slowed in March, it looks like photo-sharing/collecting site Pinterest is actually losing users in April.Most Pinterest users sign-up to the site using their Facebook accounts, and AppData, which monitors how often users of third-party apps and Web sites interact with Facebook, says the number of Facebook-connected Pinterest users has declined precipitously the past 50 days.Monthly active users are down from 11.3 million on March 1 to 11.15 million on April 1 to just 8.3 million today.Here’s a chart showing the 3/21 to 4/20 portion of this 25% decline:

via Pinterest’s Hype Bubble Has Burst, And Now It Is Actually Losing Users – Business Insider.

As our lives increasingly move to the digital realm – whether it’s what we read, what we watch, photos that once sat in frames now uploaded to a server farm somewhere in the rural United States, or even the 140-character thoughts we share with the world ­­– comes the very reconstitution of our identities online. A German artist named Tobias Leingruber recently took this concept to its logical extreme when he produced physical identification cards based on Facebook profiles (this attempt at satire was executed so well that Facebook sent Leingruber a cease-and-desist letter three days later).

Between the lines of Leingruber’s satire, though, is a very real, emerging concept. What Leingruber hit on is something I refer to as social currency. Social currency essentially refers to the idea that every person has an online identity formed through participation in social networks, websites, digital communities, and online transactions. Our everyday activities — web searches, status updates, ‘likes’, tweets, and comments — they all leave a trail of data behind which we tend to see as ephemeral or throwaway.

via How Social Currency Is Driving Identity, Trust and New Industries | TechCrunch.

But achieving a decent number of downloads is just the beginning. Apps need to be relevant to consumers’ lives so that users return to them regularly. They need fresh content, useful features, and reminders for users in the form of notifications and emails. The vast majority of apps, especially games, see their usage plummet not long after download.

via 2012: The year of the App-ocalypse? | VentureBeat.

New research by Nielsen and BabyCenter finds that moms are spending a significant amount of time using media and are among the earliest users of tech platforms. In other words, your good old Mama Bear may have taken a leap of faith with that iPhone before you gave in and purchased the trendy product yourself.

via Mothers Are Way More Tech Savvy Than You [STUDY].

“What are the biggest mistakes that you find small business leaders make when using social media?”

Marvin Powell, a Small Business Growth Consultant in Washington DC, posted that question on LinkedIn and 97 people responded.

Here are the most common complaints.

via 16 Social Media Mistakes You’re Making – Business Insider.

Crowdsourced product and service reviews are a great way to gauge how good something is before you buy, but how do you know you aren’t being had? The proliferation of for-pay opinion spamming in recent years has made it difficult to know if a five-star review is actually genuine. Luckily, spammer groups may have gotten a lot easier to spot, thanks to a new study by University of Illinois researchers and partially supported by a Google Faculty Research Award. The study, entitled Spotting Fake Reviewer Groups in Consumer Reviews, aims to uncover opinion spam using a new relation-based algorithm called GSRank Group Spam Rank.

via Google-sponsored research identifies groups of bogus product reviewers | The Verge.

The volume of information being created is growing faster than your software is able to sort it out. As a result, you’re often unable to determine the difference between a fake LinkedIn friend request, and a picture from your best friend in college of his new baby. Even with good metadata, it’s still all “data”–whether raw unfiltered, or tagged and sourced, it’s all treated like another input to your digital inbox.What’s happened is the web has gotten better at making data. Way better, as it turns out. And while algorithms have gotten better at detecting spam, they aren’t keeping up with the massive tide of real-time data.While devices struggle to separate spam from friends, critical information from nonsense, and signal from noise, the amount of data coming at us is increasingly mind-boggling.

via Content Curators Are The New Superheros Of The Web | Fast Company.