G. Oliver Young is fast becoming my new hero. Every time this Forrester analyst puts out a paper, it provides me with fodder to support my arguments supporting social media in the enterprise.

The last decade brought two related surprises: the rise of social media and the rise of search media, says a new study from the Harvard Business School. Marketing is struggling to find its place in these new communication pathways, says the report. 

The National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) did some more surfing on Google Video and found 300 films readily available to visitors.

The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) released an antitrust analysis of the proposed Google and DoubleClick, and suggested the deal would harm DoubleClick’s display ad clients.

Online shopping continues to grow and 39 percent of adults reported making a purchase online at least monthly, versus 30 percent in 2005, a 30 percent increase over two years, according to a new study from icrossing, "How America Searches: Online Retail."

The development of multi-channel marketing is one of the most impactful things happening in internet retail these days.

As I have written about before, the idea that customers want to order online but pick up their merchandise in a physical store seems counter intuitive. However, there is growing evidence that they want to do exactly that. This gives a tremendous advantage to multi-channel merchants because not only do they see an increase of online sales but they also see significant upsell revenue once they get their online customers into their stores.

Mobile social networking is practically nonexistent in day-to-day life.  This means (a) it’s a dead end or (b) there’s a lot of room for expansion.  As it gives Bluepulse $6 million in funding, VantagePoint Venture Partners appears to be betting on (b).

Social networking sites may never be the cornucopia of conversions that brand advertisers want them to be, according to a new study.

Social networking is hot – has been for years, really – and the mobile market isn’t exactly unpopular, either.  So Virgin Mobile is embracing both trends, and, as described by the company, “Virgin Mobile USA’s over 4.8 million customers can now access a variety of social networking opportunities including a group of niche-targeted mobile-optimized sites.”

Everybody is talking about this study from Oneupweb that says that internet retailers are not optimizing their sites for SEO. At the risk of rehashing, here are my two cents.

As described by Sun, StarOffice 8 is “a full-featured office productivity suite that’s compatible with Microsoft Office at just a slice of the cost.”  That “slice” is normally $70, but, thanks to Google, the software is now free – StarOffice has become available in Google Pack.

A few days ago blog ad network Chitika released a study [PDF] co-sponsored by University of Texas, Dallas that projects revenue for the top 50,000 weblogs at $500 million.

Plaxo is launching a new social network, dubbed “Pulse,” and it should offer a number of interesting features; indeed, a couple of them will address flaws in Facebook’s setup.  Yet despite this – and the preliminary support of several notable figures – many onlookers doubt that Pulse can do well.

Forty percent of all search queries are repeat queries from users trying to find information they have found before, according to a new study. But if there has been a change in search result rankings since the last time the query was entered, it significantly hinders the searcher from re-finding the information they seek.

If you have plans for any kind of viral marketing campaign in 2007, you may wish to take at the numbers revealed by a new Pew study.

RxHub today praised the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association (PCMA) for commissioning a study on the cost and benefits of electronic prescriptions.

According to search ranking factors done by SEOmoz, your keyword in your title tag is the upmost importance, but the placement of that keyword in your title tag has been debated. Some believe that placing your branding first and then kewyords in your title tag causes little or no difference when optimizing a page in the SERPS. I am going to finally uncover this once and for all.

More bandwidth, not bandwidth manipulation, has been one of the technical solutions offered as an answer to the growing capacity demands of services like VoIP and video. It’s also been used as a rebuttal to telecom industry arguments against Net Neutrality, a rebuttal, um, rebutted in a new study sponsored by…

Another clue that perception, not truth, is what you can expect from people comes out of Penn State today. A study reveals that Web searchers prefer Yahoo over Google; the only problem is, they chose a logo, not a search engine.