The data is based on a survey of 1,000 consumers in the US, about half male and half female. They cover four major age groups and 10 major cities.

"To avoid duplicating the more broad-based work of Pew, Forrester, and other research firms, our goal was to survey what we call "connected consumers,’" Razorfish explains. These connected consumers have broadband access, have spent at least $150 online in the past six months, have visited a "community site" (MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Yelp, etc.), and have consumed or created some form of digital media like photos, videos, music, or news.

"Based on previous Razorfish consumer research, we have found that these ‘connected consumers’ roughly mirror the U.S. population with broadband access. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, about 63% of all Americans today have a high-speed Internet connection, up from only 55% in 2008. This translates to roughly 200 million people, based on a July 2009 population estimate from the CIA World Factbook (total population 307,212,123, July 2009 estimate)."

In other words, pay attention to the results. You can find them all here. I wanted to highlight a few of the particularly interesting ones here, which pertain to social media use. They paint a pretty good picture of what consumers are looking for from brands on social networks (although these are certainly not the limits of what companies can do with them).

Beyond the data in the above graphs, another point worth mentioning derived from the research is that for Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, those who follow brands are mostly looking for exclusive deals or offers. This mentality will likely increase moving forward as deals get more personalized as well.

Like Jeremiah Owyang recently discussed with WebProNews, sites can connect with existing networks like Facebook, Twitter, etc. (think Facebook Connect and similar services), and in the future, people may be able to log-in to corporate sites with their Facebook (or whatever) account, which will bring up their profile information for companies to serve personalized content (or perhaps personalized deals).

The point is, consumers are clearly more than willing to interact with brands through social media, and this will likely become increasingly true as social networks themselves gain more users. It’s not only about pushing your offers out there and hoping people bite. People are becoming friends/fans of brands hoping you do give them special offers.

Interesting new marketing opportunities are going to continue to present themselves moving forward as networks get more advanced and more brands figure out new ways to use them.

Related Articles:

> How Big Brands Use Social Media

> Some Brands Have Good Ideas For Social Media. Do You?

> Forums Are Relevant in Social Media Marketing

> Using Facebook Traffic to Drive Brand Loyalty

(Coverage of the BlogWorld conference continues at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

"Social everywhere" was one of the main themes of Owyang’s talk.  Corporate websites are becoming irrelevant, he claimed, and must at least integrate social media (as most mainstream media sites already have).  "Join customers and fish where the fish are," Owyang advised.

Two other ideas he put forward were aggregating customer opinions on product pages and integrating community support within products.  "Why would you do this?  Because the conversations these solutions create are more trusted," Owyang said.

Owyang also said that real-time reactions aren’t always fast enough, and as an example, cited the "Motrin Mom" mess.  So try to get ahead and anticipate customer needs by developing an active listening program and empowering a customer advocacy program.  Think holistically about your corporate strategy and prepare for personalized content, too.

Then Owyang issued a few tips with respect to blogging.  Time is like money, he observed, since you never have enough and everybody wants a piece of it.  So budget your time, pay yourself first, maintain your blog on a regular basis, and be sure to make agreements with your employer.

WebProNews Video reporter/anchor Abby Johnson contributed to this report.

Forrester and Jeremiah Owyang found that, out of 114 marketers, roughly 60 (or 53 percent) will spend more in this area if the recession drags on for another six months.  About 48 people (or 42 percent of the sample) will keep their habits unchanged.  Only 6 folks (or 5 percent of the group) plan to cut back.

That’s pretty impressive, especially since Owyang pointed out, "During a recession, marketers are often forced to reduce budgets, in fact, it’s often one of the first buckets to get trimmed."

 

So what gives with the social media love?  Owyang called social media marketing inexpensive and believes "the opportunity to benefit from cost-effective word-of-mouth" is "promising."

As for where everyone’s money is likely to go, a second survey found that marketers are interested in social networking, blogging, user-generated content, and online video.

Owyang summed up his findings by titling the Forrester report "Social Media Playtime Is Over."

Sean Corcoran

Forrester’s report is eight pages and $750 worth of “Why You Should Pay Bloggers To Talk About Your Brand,” filed under a less ominous sounding phrase “sponsored conversations.” Sean Corcoran sums up his expensive treatise this way:

Kmart gave some bloggers a free shopping spree in exchange for a blog post about the experience — a practice we call sponsored conversation. With appropriate protections for disclosure and authenticity, this practice will take its place alongside public relations and advertising activities in the blogosphere. Marketers should take advantage of sponsored conversation as an entrée into the online conversation.

Chris Brogan

The Kmart example recalls a controversial post from new media marketing guru Chris Brogan, who accepted a $500 shopping spree in exchange for blogging about his experience. Brogan disclosed the sponsorship at the top of the resulting post. Charges were flung immediately about how his participation damaged his overall blogger credibility and authenticity. After a long rebuttal where he is an admitted PayPerPost convert and former stone-thrower himself, Brogan gave critics permission to read someone else.

“I’m here to share insights and give you actionable strategy,” wrote Brogan. “I’m going to explore even more ways that bloggers and media makers can make money in 2009.”

Marshall Kirkpatrick

ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick posted a respectful disagreement with the Forrester report, saying that, “paying bloggers to write about your company is a dangerous and unsavory path for new media and advertisers to go down.” And later, “Blogging is a beautiful thing. The prospect of this young media being overrun with ‘pay for play’ pseudo-shilling is not an attractive one to us.”

Kirkpatrick splits a few hairs in his post, especially regarding whether it is acceptable to allow event sponsors to pay for travel to an event, which ReadWriteWeb has accepted in the past. Such a declaration in rebuttal to the concept of sponsored content is an interesting tack, and makes one wonder how wide the gray area really is.

Jeremiah Owyang

Forrester senior analyst Jeremiah Owyang defends his company’s report, reiterating the importance of transparency and blogger authenticity. “Blogger authenticity means that the blogger should have complete freedom to write in their own voice – even if the content they write about the brand is negative.”

Of course, that stubborn devotion to authenticity could mean the blogger doesn’t get another shot at sponsored conversation money, which sets up a mean Catch 22, one that has existed in media since there has been media.

Brogan returns slamming “the righteous web” and inherent hypocrisy involved in compensated blogging, via AdWords or otherwise. Meanwhile Google’s Matt Cutts draws the line in the search index sand. You might remember Google penalized itself for sponsored conversations recently, and Cutts tears down Forrester’s Kmart example:

"Google found multiple bloggers that violated our quality guidelines and we took corresponding action. Those blogs are not trusted in Google’s algorithms any more."

Cutts once again calls for sponsorship disclosure and paid links that do not pass PageRank.

The resurgence of this conversation is interesting especially because of its odd timing.

Paul Harvey 1918-2009

Paul Harvey died over the weekend, a radio icon said to be older than commercial radio itself. Harvey’s news commentary was always interspersed with sponsored updates so well delivered it was difficult to distinguish where the news stopped and the commercial began—something we generally considered charming, the rest of the story right after Harvey tried to sell you something for your aching joints.

This tension between advertisers and content producers has always existed. Some producers handle it well, others don’t. Some content consumers handle it well, and others don’t. It’s hard to imagine a real justification for changing a model of content delivery that has existed and thrived for at least a century—newspapers currently notwithstanding. Media and advertising depend on one another.

There are abuses on all sides. Advertisers try to exert control over content; consumers try to exert control over advertisers so that they’ll exert control over content; governments try to exert control over content; now search engines try to exert control over content.

There is so much interest in controlling content, the only moral approach to it is to let content producers control their own content at their own risk. Certainly competing content producers will be more than happy to point out their rivals aren’t on the up and up, and if producers are found to be inauthentic or labeled as a marketing channel for a specific brands, consumers can turn the dial, load another webpage, flip the channel in response if they wish. The purists will form their righteous, purism clubs and search engines will go about their usual tasks of sorting it all out.

But are sponsored conversations, paid posts, ad columns, breaks before the rest of the story all wrong? Good luck making that argument stick, and good luck funding good content. 

If you want to watch it it’s free to members or it costs $129 straight up.

Facebook, for you noobs out there, is a social networking Web site that was originally created for college students but has been opened to anyone w/an email address and a pulse.

A few things I found really interesting:

• People put the greatest trust in friends when online. In fact, 83% of people trust the opinion of a friend or acquaintance who has used a product, while a lowly 30% trust a blogger’s review. The only question I have is why 17% of respondents have untrustworthy friends whose opinions they don’t respect.
• Email is for old people. And by old people, I mean those who were able to vote in the last election. As Jeremiah notes, as these young’uns move into the work force, they’ll be forced into using emails most likely, but they’ll also be likely to continue using Facebook and other social media sites.
• Social Media mores are still being written. Jeremiah mentioned that his policy is to accept every friend request, and he currently has over 2K (or was it 5K?) "friends" on Facebook. He later mentioned the recent story about famed blogger Robert Scoble being  temporarily suspended from Facebook for trying to take all of the emails of his Facebook friends and moving them over to Plaxo, another service. Jeremiah felt that he had broken the "social contract" by doing that. Others feel that he was just moving his contacts from one tool to another. Personally, I think if you allow everyone who asks to be your friend, you should expect this behavior.
• Facebook Pages are for products or companies. If you have a product or service, you might want to create a "page" for it (which is free) and then people can join and become your "fans."
• Facebook isn’t the end all and be all. While social media is probably here to stay in one manner or another, Facebook may or may not succeed. A strong, fluid strategy for social media sites is more important than putting all your eggs in the Facebook basket.

A lot of the content seemed to be more targeted to large companies as opposed to small businesses, but I still think there was a lot of interesting information. Whether watching the entire webinar is worth it to you depends on who your target audience is.

Comments

There are over 70 comments, and they all add color to the conversation. Today I’ve invited a number of people who’ve taken part in this discussion on my blog, their blog, or both to answer a few questions in this roundtable. Others like CK have posted their general thoughts on their own sites and have answered many of these questions in the comments on the original post.

  Some of the questions and answers below refer to the comments there, so if you have a moment, I’d recommend at least skimming them.

Our panelists today include:

• Jeremiah Owyang
• Adam Broitman
• Seni Thomas
• Howard Greenstein

I’ll save my own answers for discussion in the comments or elsewhere. As for my general perspective on this, I have to be on Facebook as part of my job. Beyond that though, I love a lot of the various aspects of the site, such as applications like Scrabulous, tagging people in photos and sharing them, engaging in certain discussion groups, and other activities. Still, Facebook crossed the line here, and the outcry is not just merited – it’s not loud enough.

The first question and answer are below; there are six more in the extended entry (if you’re reading this on the blog homepage).

1) Because of how Facebook includes members in ad campaigns, are you changing your behavior with regard to becoming a fan of marketers’ pages or adding applications?

Jeremiah: No, I assume all information I publish online is public, except my emails. (to some degree)  What I publish, I assume it will be read in my next interview, by my enemy, or by my mother.

Adam: Yes, my behavior has certainly changed. The main reason I ever became a fan of any of the brand pages, or added their apps was research. In the beginning of the Facebook ads program I would add any app or become a fan of any page but all that has changed. I am not willing to be a poster boy for Coke in the name of research (it is pretty silly and meaningless for a guy who does not even drink Coke).

Seni: I have steered clear 100% from entering any fan groups or brand based ‘normal’ groups after being spammed by Apple’s iTunes Student Music Group.  However, from anecdotal evidence high school and college students are far more accepting of spam, or simply to do not care they are being spammed.  If polled I’d bet they would say otherwise, but a number of people feel ‘more popular’ when they receive incoming messages on Facebook regardless of origin.  Finally, I believe that broadcasting brand loyalty to friends will be embraced by students, and extra face time through the insertion of profile images will actually make the system more attractive.  As a crude example girls that are members of 12+ "Hottest girls on Facebook" groups would love to have their image associated with an Agent Provocateur ad.

Howard: Yes, I’m quite concerned with becoming a fan now, even of brands or groups that I like. I’m not even sure where to look to see what the policy is regarding how my ‘fan endorsement’ may be used.

Comments

“I’m hoping I can be a community resource to companies that want not only to understand ‘what’ and ‘Why’ to use social media but to help answer ‘HOW’ to deploy. At many of the conference, speeches, and workshops folks talk about why blogging is great, what happens if you’re not listening or if you’re unauthentic -the conversation has progressed beyond that, and now we must answer the ‘How’ as community managers enter this new era of practice.”

Jeremiah takes up the role of Director of Corporate Media Strategy.

Good luck Jeremiah!

Comments

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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.