Mzinga and Babson Executive Education recently conducted a survey, which examined the adoption, use and current state of social technologies in business. The findings revealed that 86% of respondents use social technologies in one or more areas of business, including marketing, internal collaboration/learning, customer service and support, sales, and HR.

According to comScore, over 63 million people in the US use the mobile Internet, with 35% of those people accessing it on a daily basis. eMarketer says that over 70 million US mobile phone users will access the Internet from their device in 2009.

eMarketer also says that mobile e-commerce is still in its infancy though. While some retailers are ahead of the game, many are still "watching from the sidelines," and planning their mobile commerce strategies.

It doesn’t look like too many people plan to do their back-to-school shopping online. eMarketer looks at a combination of studies from BIGresearch and the National Retail Federation, Deloitte, and OfficeMax. These studies paint similar pictures, and they just don’t show too many intentions from parents to turn to the web as the school year draws near.

What do you get when you cross a video-game with social networking? Virtual worlds – and they’re no joke, particularly with younger generations who are immersing themselves in increasing numbers.

There are more than 50 million unique wealthy Internet users with annual household incomes of at least $100,000 that visited websites in March, according to comScore.

Affluent Internet users accounted for 26.1 percent of the entire Internet population for the month of March.

Broken down by gender, wealthy men represented 53 percent of affluent Internet users while women trailed slightly accounting for 47 percent.

Market research firm eMarketer has some interesting numbers looking at possible YouTube revenue. The firm pulls from a variety of sources to get a feel for just how the popular Google-owned video site is doing.

For starters, they refer to YouTube as the fifth most popular US web brand according to Nielsen, though March saw the site drop slightly to number 6.

Research shows that marketers are spending more on online advertising and less on ads in newspapers, magazines, and radio. According to eMarketer, each year, ad spending on online media is growing by at least a percentage point.

eMarketer also projects that online ad dollars will jump about 5% by 2013. Here’s how they see it playing out:

Research conducted by PLYmedia shows that subtitles in online videos increase the the amount of time a user spends watching them by 40%. Furthermore, in a comparison between subtitled videos to identical videos without subtitles, PLYmedia found that the videos with subtitles were watched 91% to completion, compared with 66% to completion for those without subtitles.

It’s that time again folks. It’s time to write a headline that if someone doesn’t look beyond the statement it may seem a little odd or maybe even shocking. Of course since we are concerned with Internet marketing here this is actually a story with a pleasant ending.

If it seems to you that everyone and his mother is already using a social network, well, just wait – according to a new report from eMarketer, plenty more relatives will find their way to sites like Facebook and MySpace within the next four years.

Indicators that times are tough shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, and a new report from eMarketer suggests that some advertisers will respond by making cutbacks.  The research and analysis company took a close look at a few social networks, though, and believes advertisers in the UK won’t turn their backs on them too much.

Online advertising growth is set to slow into single digits for the first time in 2009 according to eMarketer’s revised projections.

eMarketer is basing its projections on the latest Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) data. It says online ad spending will reach 25.7 billion in 2009, which is 8.9 percent over the $23.6 billion that will be spent in 2008.

Previously eMarketer predicted in August that online ad spending would grow 14.5 percent in 2009.

Online advertising will continue to grow despite economic woes according to the latest analysis from eMarketer.

The majority of analyst firms expect to see spending growth for online advertising to continue to show double-digit increases in 2008 and 2009.

If the Dow passes below 2,000 and World War III breaks out, we feel confident that at least a couple of corporate reps will continue to argue about whether Facebook or MySpace is more popular.  Yet new data falls on Facebook’s side where some retailers are concerned, anyway.

Socks get lost all the time, and it’s easy enough to misplace a pen.  But people perk up when a billion dollars disappears, and eMarketer has lowered its prediction concerning U.S. online advertising spending by that amount.

Earlier today, the subject was blogs.  Now we’re on to social networks.  It seems people in the UK are becoming quite fond of the things, as statistics in two critical areas has jumped since last year.

When it comes to online television, American companies and programs are what we tend to discuss.  Research shows that online television is extremely popular in Europe, however, and so Europeans could drive the next wave of advertising trends.

What’s £200 million between friends?  Well, in this case, it’s the amount by which eMarketer believes it overestimated worldwide social networking ad spending in a not-too-distant year.

Now here’s the kind of prediction that I like to hear: eMarketer’s John du Pre Gauntt says that “2007 was not ‘the year of mobile marketing’ that it was advertised to be, and 2008 won’t be either.” I don’t have anything against mobile marketing itself, I’m just tired of the hype. So a down-to-earth look at the future of mobile marketing is what I want.

eMarketer’s key points:

The markets have been open for roughly one hour today, and at the moment, the Dow is up by about 200 points.  A new report states that online ad spending, for its part, is supposed to rise by 23 percent this year.

That online video will become more popular is something we all guessed.   But a new report quantifies its growth, and predicts that over half of all Americans will watch video online this year.