Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world. The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles. But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won’t be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.”

Everybody had a collective laugh at Tyler’s words at the time but it now appears to have been a prescient statement as the Republican primaries will finally commence in less than a month with the Iowa caucus and Gingrich is poised as a legitimate front-runner. And as with all things serious and bold in our new American century, Gingrich appears ready to make it Facebook-official as he has amassed over 12,000 new fans on his Facebook page in just the past seven days. While that’s still far behind from his Republican rivals – Mitt Romney has a towering 1.2 million Facebook fans – Gingrich has demonstrated that he doesn’t really require the standard accoutrements typical of a succeeding presidential campaign. And of course such an accomplishment seems to only bolster Gingrich’s approval of Gingrich:

Accompanying the news of Gingrich’s surge in popularity, All Facebook provided a handy line graph to detail the swell of fans that have Liked the candidate’s official page:

All Facebook goes on to explain, “Newt Gingrich is running away from the other candidates on Twitter, with more than 1.3 million followers. And Mitt Romney and Ron Paul have the most Facebook fans among the GOP presidential hopefuls, and they follow Gingrich in the latest poll.” It’s true, too: Romney comes in at a distant second to Gingrich on Twitter with about 188,000 followers. With Herman Cain bowing out of the race (albeit was labeled a “suspension” of his campaign), Gingrich would appear to only continue to make significant gains in popularity as he collects former Cain supporters.

Of course, now we look to Twitter to unscientifically corroborate Gingrich’s swing in popularity.

Seems pretty exciting, but after seeing the popularity of so many Republican primary candidates wax and wane like phases of the moon, it remains to be seen if Gingrich can actually sustain this momentum (he should probably be sending a pretty sweet Christmas card to Cain in a couple of weeks, too). Either way, Gingrich’s Twitter followers are huge so now the issue begs the question: is Twitter the new metric with which we measure a candidate’s election odds (or the popularity of anything, for that matter)? Has the Newtation of this election cycle officially commenced?

"The shift from offline to online is in full swing as marketers look to measure direct increases in top-line sales, site traffic and improve overall marketing return on investment," says Morgan Stewart, ExactTarget’s director of research and strategy and co-author of the report. "Interestingly, brand reputation is becoming a more significant driver of the migration to digital marketing, particularly when it comes to social media."

Over 70% of respondents to the survey say they are increasing budgets for off-site social media marketing through sites like Facebook and Twitter, while about 65% are planning on increasing their budget for on-site social media.

Additional findings: 

- 28% of marketers are shifting marketing budgets from traditional to digital channel

- Two-thirds of marketers are planning to increase investments in social media even though less than one-fifth can effectively measure ROI.

- 64% of companies plan to increase budgets in search engine optimization.

- 56% plan to increase budgets for mobile marketing.

- 54% plan to increase budgets for email marketing.
 
- 51% plan to increase budgets for paid search.
 
- 42% of marketers plan to keep budgets the same as 2009 and 13% plan to decrease their overall marketing budget.

- 41% of marketers plan to decrease spending on print and radio marketing in 2010.

"The research shows a healthy outlook for the digital marketing industry with the majority of responding companies increasing their budgets for most digital channels," says Linus Gregoriadis, research director at Econsultancy. "Social media marketing is the area where companies are most likely to be spending more money during 2010, but areas such as search engine marketing and email marketing will remain buoyant."

A summary of the report, titled More Money, More Channels: Marketing Budgets for 2010, can be found here.

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According to the poll, adult Internet users are spending an average of 13 hours a week online." Of course, people’s usage varies greatly; one in five (20%) of adult Internet users are online for only two hours or less a week while one in seven (14%) are spending 24 or more hours a week online," says Harris.

The firm presents the following as highlights from the poll:

- The age groups that spend the most time online are those aged 30-39 (18 hours) and those aged 25-29 (17 hours) and 40-49 (17 hours).

- Half (50%) of all those online bought something on the Internet in the last month.  This includes 62% of those aged 30-39 and 56% of those aged 40-49.

- The number of adults online, now 184 million (80%), has not changed significantly since 2008 and 2007.  This includes those online at work, at home, at school or any other locations.

- However, the number of adults who are online at home has increased to 76% this year, and 75% last year, compared to 70% in 2006, and 66% in 2005.

More findings from the poll can be found here, including more graphs, breaking them down by hours spent each week online by age, purchased online in last month by age, and PC/Internet use trends, as well as the estimated numbers of adults who are online – all by year.

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The poll covered 1,125 IT decision-makers. Google has prepared an entire report based on the findings, which is available for perusal here (pdf).

The report covers measurement of IT success, IT’s role in communications security and compliance, mapping cloud computing benefits to IT performance metrics, barriers to cloud computing adoption, etc.

"The findings provide some insights on what types of organizations are moving to the cloud, what value they find there, and what the key drivers for and barriers to adoption are," says Adam Swidler of the Google Postini Services team.

On the Google Enterprise Blog, the company shares some key findings from the survey:

- More than 60% of respondents indicated that the IT department holds the majority of the responsibility for communications security and compliance, but fewer than 20% feel they are well equipped to handle it.

- Although price is mentioned as a key deterrent for respondents who are not yet using cloud-based apps, value is cited as a key benefit by respondents who already work in the cloud.

"In these findings – and in our conversations with businesses of all types and sizes – we are seeing that more and more businesses are finding enhanced productivity and IT efficiency when they move their applications to the cloud with services such as Postini or Google Apps," says Swidler. That the cloud movement is more than just a trend is validated by our research findings, which indicate that 50% of the respondents who were aware of but not currently using cloud-based apps are planning to deploy a cloud solution within the next 12 months."

Google has had a fair amount of issues with Gmail, Google Docs, and other products included in Google Apps in recent memory. Service has been interrupted multiple times. These reliability issues could be holding back adoption of Google Apps (and cloud computing in general) to some extent.

The survey found that 70% of marketers say they’ve never made a change to a product or marketing efforts based on feedback from consumers on social media sites.

"Customer feedback should be the front lines of product development," says Jim Tsokanos, MS&L’s president, North America. "Marketers need to act on information culled from social sites and are missing out on a key opportunity to improve and shape their products and programs based on what their consumers need and want."

The top three business uses of social media according to the survey are:

1. Managing and monitoring customer feedback (41%)

2. Understanding the consumer and competitive landscape (41%)

3. Reaching key influencers (33%)

There is still a significant amount of skepticism in corporate America, regarding social media. According to the survey, lack of time and resources are the biggest barriers to successfully incorporating social media into marketing campaigns. 43% said lack of knowledge and expertise, and 39% said they are not convinced of its value or ROI. 75% say their companies are not equipped to handle global social media campaigns, and 66% say the majority of their social media activities are locally equipped.

"If brands do not have a social media presence, consumers will create one for them. These results indicate that many companies are not engaging in social media in ways that truly drive business results and sustain relationships with customers," Tsokanos said. "Employees are the best brand ambassadors a company can have. By not having a specific approach regarding employee use of social media, companies miss out on leveraging their largest and most knowledgeable fan base." 

49% of senior marketing executives say their companies have no specific approach regarding employee use of social media to share messages on behalf of the organization or its brands, and 39% of respondents said that their companies are not using any of the most common social media tools in their marketing efforts. Similarly, 39%, say none of their current marketing budget is dedicated to social media programs.

The survey polled 271 US chief marketing officers, VPs of marketing and marketing directors.

Sure, you have to take the economy into consideration, but there are other factors that can keep people from making purchases online. A new poll from Harris Interactive found that a lack of human assistance is one of those factors, and a big one at that.

Here are some interesting findings from that poll:

- 4 in 5 online adults who have purchased items online in the last six months (77%) say they would be interested in getting help from a real person before making certain online purchases.

- However, over 4 in 5 (82%) say there have been times when they have not been able to get help from a real person.

- Over half (52%) of those who haven’t been able to get the help they needed from a real person say it’s affected their decision to not purchase the product.

Just look at the following graphs:

 

"No level of automation can replace the human touch. The results indicate that shoppers still want real people to help them purchase products, even in a digital setting," said Prashant Nedungadi, CEO and founder of IMshopping, who commissioned the survey. "Many retailers have started taking steps in this direction and we believe it will be the single biggest push for the retail industry over the next several years."

The following graph shows some of the types of items people really want human assistance with before making purchasing decisions.

Out of the people who have purchased items online in the past six months, the most commonly purchased items include clothing, books, music, health and beauty products, and travel-related items.

While it is a good idea to make the online purchase as easy on your customers as possible, from simply the design and usability standpoint, you may consider whether or not you are offering enough human assistance, and how easy that is for the customer to obtain.

"It is disconcerting to see what in concept is a very informed audience knowingly rolling the dice when it comes to staying secure on line – it is an important indicator of the practices of general consumers," said Siobhan MacDermott, head of global communications and investor relations with AVG. "If the informed press is exposed, then even more so is the home user that is not as savvy at detecting or protecting against the latest scam."

"The value of the research is not that it exposes journalists, but rather it gives us great insight to how our more knowledgeable users are, or are not, protecting themselves," said MacDermott. "This tells the security community that we have a great deal of work to do as users are not doing many of the basics."

Here are some highlights from the poll:

- More than half don’t change their passwords, or rely on their company to do it for them, even though 13 percent have experienced critical data loss or system failure due to malware to their systems.

- 80 percent of media staff rarely or never inform their network administrator of online security concerns they encounter.

- 36 percent use Wi-Fi networks most of the time, potentially endangering them to security risks associated with public networks

- 90 percent of them use some sort of social networking site, with LinkedIn (75 percent) the most popular site followed by Facebook (70 percent) and Twitter (51 percent).

-  20 percent access social networking sites both from their mobile phone and their computer

"Clearly, we’ve got to do a better job as a security community in shifting the mentality of our users from one that is dependent on the system to keep them safe to one that takes personal accountability and understands their role in the security continuum," said MacDermott. "Users have to understand they are a vital piece of [the] equation and that they have a great deal of ownership in shoring up their cyberspaces."

According to AVG, over 40,000 new viruses and malware arrive in virus labs around the world every day. Many of these are documented in the media. 

"Real-time video is coming to the forefront for mobile operators, as many respondents stated significant video activity is in the pipeline for the next two years," says Ovum’s Mark Radoff. "Both the small and large operators are keen to launch these services and determine ways to productize real-time video, to differentiate their services and potentially increase ARPU."

Over half of participating wireless operators intend to launch, or increase access to, real-time video services over the next 2 years. To compete with larger players, smaller operators are offering more Internet access and are pursuing flexible IP communication applications from 3rd parties. Nearly half of the operators surveyed are enthusiastic about delivering "open platforms" for 3rd party software developers.

So far according to the report, only AT&T Wireless has launched a video conferencing service, but most hint that one is on the way.

"Most US mobile operators are running what is classified as a 3G network or 3.5G or equivalent network, able to ensure high quality VOIP and video-based services," says Emerick Woods, CEO of Global IP Solutions, who released the report. "Now, with 4G and sophisticated WiMax networks beginning to emerge, there are fewer barriers to offering quality, real-time video and VoIP on mobile phones and networks.”

A lot of operators are interested in open platforms, where software vendors can launch their own real-time video products. But many are also unsure of such a model. Some of them suggested interest in a model like that of Google’s Android.

We’ve seen video reach new and interesting places in recent memory, and mobile real-time video is certainly in that category. The rising popularity of mobile platforms like the iPhone and Android should only fuel the fire of users getting involved with this kind of video. It only makes sense that more mobile operators pave the way.