Is it just me or is the whole discussion surrounding “social media marketing” getting more and more annoying? “The consumer is in control”, “It’s quality, not quantity”, “Listening is everything” – it feels like one big broken record of lofty …

I’m happy to see the NFL finally embracing social media rather than labeling it as a major distraction.  The greatest team in the NFL, the NY Giants (yes, I’m biased), will be pulling in real-time tweets from fans to the …

It really does begin to feel like a broken record. “This social media and engagement stuff is quite exciting, but does any of this really drive ticket sales?” I must get asked this question at least once a week. It’s …

Tons of companies claim to offer advertising opportunities to target consumers based on their social media usage. Targeting consumers based on who their friends are, what they’ve shared or the sentiment of what they are posting – these are all …

Read more.

For those of you unfamiliar with the “Streisand Effect”, the term is based on the online phenomenon in which attempting to censor or remove a piece of information has the unintended consequence of causing the information to be publicised widely, …

Over the past few years, I’ve had the privilege to watch firsthand the growth of the social media rage in the live entertainment space. A few years ago we monitored our clients’ tens of thousands of followers – today, it’s …

A friend of mine told me about her trip to Japan several years ago, where she ended up making friends with a group of businessmen in Tokyo who kindly bought her a few drinks while she waited for a …

Over the last two months, I had the chance to embrace my inner ‘Michael Palin‘ and traverse across several continents. I’ve checked out New York during Broadway’s busiest summer period, the London’s West End and of course my …

Well, they’re not exactly secrets.

You’ll recall a couple weeks ago that we were discussing the fact that a panel at the Tickets.com Executive Summit turned into a good-natured food fight over the topic of price optimization.  The …

In case you needed any more research to show the impact that social media has had on consumer media consumption patterns, here’s an article highlighting the point that four out of five Americans now belong to a social network.

Now, I know there are still a ton of skeptics in our industry about the topic of social media and at what point is the investment worth it and at what size should that investment be. This is a good thing!

Winning in the social media space is not easy. There is a ton of hype and often little talk about the leg work and the extensive creative thinking that is needed to make a social media presence an impactful part of your overall marketing plan.

I think these are the right kind of discussions that we all should be having and I can tell you our agency is doing extensive research trying to develop some basic benchmarks for the industry. In the meantime, take a look at the following research report – these numbers really do highlight how the rate of growth in social media usage is absolutely staggering.

According to the article…

"We’d like to officially welcome you to The Facebook Age. Now, according to a new report from Forrester Research, more than four in five U.S. online adults report using social media at least once a month, while half report participating in social networks like Facebook. And while young people continue to march toward almost universal adoption of social applications, the most rapid growth occurred among consumers 35 and older.

‘This means the time to build social marketing applications is now,’ said Forrester analyst and report author Sean Corcoran. ‘Interactive marketers should influence social network chatter, master social communication, and develop social assets — even if their customers are older.’"

Read on.