Social Networks Grow Up: More Adults Connecting Online

Brian Solis points out that PEW Research released a report documenting the increase in social networking activity among U.S.-based adults for both personal and professional relationships.

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Bugaboo - A New SocNet

The baby stroller company built a socnet into its site: Bugaboo Friends.

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Does Facebook Replace Face Time or Enhance It?

Time Magazine takes a look on how Facebook is shaping interpersonal communications, how people who would never return one another's calls are Friending each other.

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Facebook Blows A Whopper Of An Opportunity

Burger King launches a Facebook application that encourages users to remove Facebook friends. Sacrifice ten of them and you got a free Whopper. 233,906 friends were removed by 82,771 people in less than a week.

Facebook is overjoyed, right? What a great example to show the Madison Avenue agencies on how a big brand can get real engagement from users. This is the future of advertising. Or it could have been, if Facebook hadn’t shut it down, citing privacy issues.

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Typical SocNetters Address 110 People/Week; Spend $101 Online/Month

With 40 million active users in the US, social networking has grown 93% since 2006 — and is poised to play a vital role in the current economic downturn, according to a trend report from Netpop Research. Crucially, Netpop also predicts a related increase in social media advertising opportunities.

The report, "Social Networkers US: Who they are and what they mean for next generation advertising," drew from a projectable sample of 4,384 broadband users to pinpoint the specific demographics, online behaviors, preferences and "passions" of online contributors and social networkers.

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Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope

A report on Twitter from the HP's Social Computing Laboratory.

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Ad Model Has Failed For Social Nets

While online ad spending is projected to continue expanding - albeit at a much more modest rate of growth - the contraction of the general economy is expected to put even greater downward pressure on the price of both online display and search advertising, according to a new 2009 outlook for the Internet industry released Monday by a top Wall Street researcher. That analyst, JP Morgan's Imran Khan, also predicted that advertising models would fail for two of the Web's hottest emerging platforms - online video and social media - and that it would take longer than expected for a substantive mobile advertising marketplace to emerge.

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