C-suite executives are increasingly convinced of the benefits of engaging with their customers on social media platforms. A February 2012 survey of 329 senior executives in North America by management and digital consulting firm PulsePoint Group and the Economist Intelligence Unit found that the vast majority of companies who had invested in social media saw a positive shift in their bottom line as a result.

Executives who said their companies had established an extensive social media presence reported a return on investment that was more than four times that of companies with little or no social network engagement activity.

The benefits of social media were especially pronounced in a few select areas. Fully 84% of executives polled said that social media campaigns had increased the effectiveness of marketing and sales efforts, while 81% said a social media presence had helped their companies increase market share.

Companies should use social media to create spaces for consumers to have meaningful conversations with employees and other stakeholders. Almost seven in 10 respondents said they had seen a spike in their sales by letting customers talk about their brands on social media platforms, even if some of that dialogue was negative. This kind of approach builds trust and credibility with consumers, potentially transforming them into brand advocates whose value is immense, if difficult to measure.

Despite these positive signs for social media campaigns, assessments of their effectiveness remain largely subjective. Almost half of executives said that the major impediment to social media campaigns was the lack of a standardized metric that can measure a return on investment. While measuring followers and Facebook “likes” provides marketers with a hard number, no one yet knows how those numbers translate into a quantifiable return for brands.

Armed with fast, high-powered smartphones, a new class of consumers, 100 million strong and growing, is rerouting the path to purchase and redefining cultural norms in the US.

Members of the “smartphone class” stand apart from other Americans in the way they shop, communicate, consume media—even how they use their spare time. Its members define themselves by their connectedness and their sense of empowerment through unfettered access to real-time information.

“What others do with a PC, they do with their smartphones,” said Catherine Boyle, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, “The Smartphone Class: Connected Consumers Transform US Commerce and Culture.” “Their phone is their workplace, entertainment center and their marketplace. They watch videos in coffee shops, social network at concerts, play games in waiting rooms, scan barcodes in stores and shop with their smartphone from anywhere at any time. Their behaviors are rerouting the traditional path to purchase and they are proving to the rest of America that spare moments can be productive ones, too.”

eMarketer estimates nearly 116 million Americans will use a smartphone at least monthly by the end of this year, up from 93.1 million in 2011. By 2013, they will represent over half of all mobile phone users, and by 2016, nearly three in five consumers will have a smartphone.

The smartphone class is not defined by age, gender, income or race. Instead it is defined by its members’ shared behaviors. Understanding the common behavioral traits that unite the class makes members easy to recognize and underscores the influence this class of consumers is having on how Americans communicate, consume media and shop.

One of those behaviors is to always be “snacking.” The smartphone class doesn’t tolerate dull moments; members turn to their phones for instant gratification. Depending on their mood in the moment, gratification might mean completing a quick task or finding a fun distraction. For marketers, this rising content consumption means an increasing number of touchpoints where they can reach consumers. eMarketer forecasts double-digit growth in mobile gaming as well as music and video consumption among the smartphone class through 2015.

“Snacking on mobile in small amounts throughout the day can be as lucrative to brands as it is gratifying to members of the smartphone class,” said Boyle. “The five minutes grazing on news in the morning, the 15 minutes playing a game at lunch and the two minutes watching a video at the grocery store are all opportunities for marketers to get a message across or close a sale.”

As the worldwide social network audience soars well past 1 billion people, marketers are tackling the difficult task of coordinating their social media marketing efforts on a global scale.

A grassroots, organic approach may have worked in the early days, but many marketers now have dozens or even hundreds of social media profiles to manage worldwide. This requires a delicate combination of corporate oversight, to keep brand messaging consistent, and flexibility, to empower local managers who know their markets best.

“Multinational marketers have cobbled together their global social media footprint mainly by allowing regional offices to set up their own pages and accounts,” said Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer principal analyst and author of the new report, “Social Media in the Marketing Mix: Managing Global Expansion.” “But now many are finding that they need a more organized approach to gain control of a bulging portfolio. As marketers work toward a social strategy, a plan for global management should be a key part of the discussion.”

With social network usage rising rapidly worldwide, its center of gravity is shifting away from North America and Western Europe, where usage patterns are now mature. The markets to watch over the next few years will be in regions such as Asia-Pacific, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, and Eastern Europe.

For example, the Middle East and Africa together experienced a 33.9% increase in social network users in 2011, while Asia-Pacific’s user population grew 27.5%. Both regions will continue to see double-digit percentage gains through 2014. By contrast, North America’s growth rate was just 9.5% in 2011 and is expected to fall to 4% by 2014.

The fastest-growing social networking countries—India and Indonesia—are also experiencing rapid economic transformation. In these developing markets, brands have an opportunity to use what they have learned in their home region to create smarter and more effective social media marketing programs that can be tailored to local usage patterns, such as accessing social networks via smartphones or feature phones.

A battery of disruptions have roiled the US recording industry and shrunk it in half in just over a decade. The industry’s past experiments with digital media seemed promising at first but have not generated enough revenue to stem losses from sagging sales of compact discs. Against this backdrop, can a new generation of cloud-based streaming models revive the industry?

“The short answer is maybe,” said Paul Verna, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, “Cloud-Based Music Streaming: Emerging Opportunities for Brands.” “Key trends are pointing in the right direction, including positive technology adoption forecasts, a profusion of social sharing activity connected to music, video channels that are generating revenue and expanded marketing opportunities around music content.”

In a sign of how important online streaming and subscription music services have become to the recording industry, trade publication Billboard recently updated its weekly Hot 100 song chart to include data from Spotify, Slacker, Rhapsody, Cricket/Muve, Rdio and MOG. The revamped methodology went live in March 2012, after several months of testing that showed a rising curve for audio streams, from 320.5 million in the first week of 2012 to 494 million during the week of March 4, 2012. By comparison, digital track sales during that period decreased from 46.4 million to 27.1 million, according to Nielsen.

Another indicator of the popularity of cloud-based streaming was a 50.5% increase in online music listening hours in 2011. According to a February 2012 report from AccuStream Research, US consumers spent 1.3 billion hours listening to music through internet radio and other streaming services in 2011, up from 865 million hours in 2010.

The media spend associated with US internet radio and on-demand streaming services amounted to $293.7 million in 2011, according to AccuStream Research. This compares with $171.7 million spent on subscriptions to those services. AccuStream forecast that the total market would grow by 78% in 2012.

Ad monetization is expected to grow at a healthy clip on the mobile side as well. eMarketer expects US mobile music advertising revenues to hit $591.5 million in 2015, more than doubling 2012’s total of $264.5 million. According to eMarketer estimates, the advertising component of mobile revenue is much higher with music than with gaming or video, largely because of the popularity of Pandora and Spotify on mobile devices.

The full report, “Cloud-Based Music Streaming: Emerging Opportunities for Brands,” also answers these key questions:

* What business models are emerging around cloud-based streaming of music content?
* What opportunities exist for marketers to capture revenue associated with this content?
* What role will social media play in the music streaming ecosystem?

Find this report on eMarketer.com at http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1008970

With smartphone users expected to make up over half of US mobile users by next year, content consumption on mobile devices is also on the rise, including video viewing and social networking.

eMarketer estimates that by 2016, more than 110 million Americans—or one-third of the total US population—will watch video content on a mobile phone at least once per month. This year, just under 20% of the population, or 25.2% of US mobile phone users, are expected to watch mobile video monthly.

In addition, according to eMarketer estimates, the population of mobile music listeners will nearly triple in the US between 2011 and 2016, rising from 30.9 million to 81.3 million. eMarketer’s estimates of mobile music listening include music directly downloaded or streamed to mobile phones at least once per month, and exclude sideloaded tracks.

Mobile social networking will reach a greater share of the overall population even sooner, however. One-third of US consumers, or 42.6% of mobile phone users, will log in to social networking sites via mobile devices at least monthly by 2014. The vast majority of these mobile social network users—like mobile video viewers and mobile music listeners—will be using a smartphone to access social content on the go.

And most will be visiting Facebook from their phones. eMarketer estimates the number of monthly mobile Facebook users in the US last year at 49.4 million, rising to 93.9 million by 2014. By then, over 98% of these users will be accessing the site on a smartphone.

eMarketer’s estimates of mobile content usage, including video, music and social networking, are based on the analysis of survey and traffic data from research firms and regulatory agencies, historical trends, company-specific data, and demographic and socio-economic factors.

In the second half of 2011, after months of speculation about whether—and how—Google would finally “get” social, the search giant rolled out Google+ to great fanfare. For tens of millions of users of other Google products, there was little obstacle to joining the new social network. But in spite of its fast growth in user numbers, the service has not enjoyed the stickiness of other top social media properties.

comScore reports, for example, that average time users in the US spent on the social networking site was down to 3.3 minutes in January 2012, from 5.1 minutes in November of last year.

“Google+ has seen millions of users sign up for the site since its July 2011 launch,” said Kimberly Maul, eMarketer writer/analyst and author of the new report, “Google+: Influencing the Integration of Search and Social.” “However, engagement and participation aren’t up to speed with other social networks, and that has become a major obstacle for turning Google+ into a relevant social network.”

Even with activity on Google+ low and in decline as its novelty wears off, the social network can still have an impact on Google users as they visit other Google properties, especially as they search. The unveiling of Search Plus Your World in early 2012 raised eyebrows among some privacy advocates worried that Google was integrating personal information in unexpected ways, and it also surprised some search users with results that seemed less useful than before. A searcher logged in to Google who had signed up to Google+ and added a few people to Circles might not be actively using the social network anymore, but if that user’s connections were active, their +1s and Picasa photo albums had a sudden and unexpected prominence in their search results.

This effect—along with a need to claim a brand-name page before someone else does—can make Google+ difficult for marketers to ignore. And the service does have many differentiating elements, including some that set it apart from the current top social sites. In March 2012, eMarketer collected information about the top features that brands can use on Google+, including Circles, Hangouts and Direct Connect.

But though those brand pages offer marketing opportunities not available from competitors like Facebook, putting dollars toward Google+ before usage levels increase will remain a tough sell.

The full report, “Google+: Influencing the Integration of Search and Social,” also answers these key questions:

* How many people are using Google+?
* How have marketers begun to use the site’s offerings?
* How does Google+ interact with other Google products, including search?

To view this report in full, visit http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1008976

The battered US economy has driven price-conscious consumers online to do research before making a purchase, and eMarketer estimates that there will be 92.5 million online coupon users by the end of 2012. Those savings-savvy consumers will no doubt be helped by electronic circulars, which now rival their print counterparts in penetration, according to a November 2011 study of US internet users by Yahoo! and Ipsos.

The poll found that 27% of respondents preferred receiving digital coupons and deals as opposed to getting them offline, compared with 33% who still preferred print versions. Of those that favored digital, eight in 10 said the convenience of digital deals made them preferable, especially their direct delivery to email inboxes. Seven in 10 liked the ease of management that digital deals offered, saying they facilitated comparison shopping and were easy to share.

According to the research, email was the most powerful digital channel for coupons and deals—64% of respondents subscribed to at least one regularly delivered discount email newsletter. And of those who received newsletters, about half checked them at least once a day.

The study also found that compared to their mobile and tablet counterparts, PC users were more likely to be motivated by digital circulars to conduct product research after receiving a discount promotion. Almost half of PC users said they would do more research on a product after receiving a deal email, while only one in five of those on smartphones or tablets had a similar response.

Additionally, 37% of US PC users responded to a digital circular by making a purchase based on an offer contained within, well more than the 13% of mobile users and 17% of tablet users who did so.

As digital deals catch on, marketers should make sure to assess customer usage and engagement patterns to stay on top of consumer demand.

As marketers look to integrate their advertising efforts into a more cohesive strategy, many are eyeing digital media, specifically owned and earned media.

According to a February report from the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA), digital marketers worldwide are investing a greater portion of their total marketing budget online this year, which is not surprising given their familiarity with the medium. One third expect to invest 60% or more of their ad budget digitally.

Though both paid digital and traditional media were important investments, 25% of respondents planned to significantly increase their digital owned and earned media spend, compared to only 8% who planned to do the same for paid digital media and 4% for traditional media.

One reason for such a transition in spending could be the explosion of social media, and its growing importance in the marketing mix for both traditional and digital media.

“For a lot of advertisers, social is actually the bridge of their understanding between the traditional world and the digital space,” said Michael McVeigh, senior vice president of strategic services at Zeta Interactive, in a February 21, 2012, interview with eMarketer. “Social is where brands start to see how many people they have reached throughout their network, much like those big, overarching air powers of TV and radio.”

The focus on social media goes beyond marketing investment and affects organizational structure. Almost 73% of client-side marketers worldwide said they are transforming the structure of their marketing departments. Of those, 45.8% have created cross-departmental groups to leverage social media monitoring and other socially obtained insights throughout the company. In addition, about a third have specifically integrated social listening with their traditional research departments.

Incorporating earned and owned media, such as social media, into the marketing mix can also reduce overall advertising costs. A February 2012 study from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) found 84% of US advertisers said they currently face challenges in identifying cost savings and reductions for their 2012 marketing efforts. This number was up from 77% last year.

Though many B2B and B2C organizations trimmed costs through savings on travel and departmental expenses as well as agency costs, 53% of B2B marketers planned to reduce campaign advertising budgets. B2C marketers were less inclined to cut ad budgets, with only 44% planning to do so.

However, a greater number of B2C marketers (45%) looked to alter the marketing channel mix to reduce costs.

B2B marketers appeared less likely to reallocate their marketing mix—just 31% planned to do so in order to reduce marketing expenses.

“When it comes to fostering customer loyalty, opt-in email marketing is not just a major channel in itself. It’s an excellent example for all other touchpoints,” said David Hallerman, eMarketer principal analyst and author of the new report, “The Lessons of Email: Using Digital Touchpoints for Customer Loyalty.” “Email marketing has been around for a long time, so it might not have the same sizzle as newer, hotter marketing channels. But don’t confuse lack of flash with lack of effectiveness. Consumers are more open to email messaging than most other digital marketing, and it still gets results.”

In an October 2011 survey of US internet users by Adpropo, 47% of respondents said they held a positive attitude toward email ads, the highest positive response for any of the digital ad formats measured.

Internet users’ favorable feelings towards email advertising stem largely from marketers contacting only those recipients who have granted them permission to do so, as well as from the personalization and relevancy common to such messages. Those efforts leave consumers with a greater sense of control over their relationship with a brand and a perception of having gotten reciprocal value from the interaction. Savvy marketers are applying that lesson to their other principal digital touchpoints—brand websites, social media and mobile—in order to more effectively reach customers and further encourage loyalty across channels.

“Generally speaking, neither brands nor customers want to connect through a single channel,” said Hallerman. “Proliferation [of digital touchpoints] has created both opportunity and complexity for marketers, who face challenges figuring out how and when to communicate with customers … Consumer acceptance of opt-in email exemplifies what happens when brands offer [consumers] … control.”

Consumers connect with brands both via email lists and by “liking” companies on Facebook. While users want to receive discounts and special offers via both channels, connecting with a brand on social media is an added public display of support.

Chadwick Martin Bailey analyzed why consumers engage via email and Facebook and found that receiving discounts and special offers was the top motivation. Of the US respondents who had an email account, 58% cited that as a reason for subscribing to email lists. Other reasons for email participation included taking part in a specific promotion (39%) and because the consumer was a customer or supporter of the business or nonprofit (37%).

On Facebook, the desire to receive discounts and special offers was also the top reason for “liking” a brand, but it was only cited by 41% of US Facebook users, a smaller percentage of respondents than those that subscribed to email lists for the same reason. Additionally, 25% of respondents said they “like” a business or nonprofit’s Facebook page because they want to show their support, and 22% said they wanted to also demonstrate their support to others on Facebook.

Both email and Facebook can be great ways to connect with customers and supporters of a business or nonprofit. Email lists have their benefits, including the ability to have a database of contact information of supporters or customers, but with Facebook, there is the added advantage that the consumer is publicly showing support via a social recommendation. A 2011 study from 8thBridge found that consumers most often “like” a retailer on Facebook because they purchased a product and liked it; they then used Facebook to provide a straightforward recommendation for friends to see.

It still holds that consumers want discounts and deals when they connect with a business or nonprofit via email or Facebook. But, especially as consumers live more of their lives on social networks, connecting to a business or nonprofit on Facebook is not only about promotions, but a way to show public support for preferred businesses and nonprofits.