The more and more people talk about social media as a buzz word, the more its true meaning is going to be lost. Social media isn’t a tool, its a genre of tools that have become a powerful trend on the internet. Elements of social media can be used as tools for many different marketing strategies but you have to know what these tools are in order to use them effectively. Cory Treffiletti wrote an article that breaks it up nicely into 4 tools (no shallow buzzwords here). The four elements are: Social networks (myspace, facebook), social applications, citizen journalism (blogs, wikis), and virtual worlds (second life). Now that you have a social media tool-kit you can effectively implement social media into your online programs.

MediaPost’s “Online Publishing Insider” had a great post yesterday. They outlined a process on how to test and optimize a content-driven website for the best “stickiness.” Stickiness is the most popular philosophical metric for measuring interactivity. This is a great article to share because it brings up a great point to a post I wrote last month on building a successful e-commerce user experience. Although e-commerce would use a different metric for success (sales conversions), the approach for developing the experience is very similar. The point I want to bring up is MediaPost defined a quantitative approach based on statistical research procedures to complete each step. Where we described the approach as a more qualitative method for success.

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No, not model hot. A new trend report was released with some astonishing trends of Internet connectivity growth within Europe’s 48 countries. As most would expect, the tech-savvy Scandinavian region has the highest Internet penetration with estimates around 80% of the entire population. Growth is also evident in most of Europe’s other countries, but what is astounding is the growth by demographic. Internet penetration amongst 16-24 year olds in all nations of Europe is between 80-90%. Generation Y is a new breed of consumers that, no matter their country’s infrastructure are finding ways to keep connected.

source: eMarketer

AIGA Luncheon + Speaker: Jeromy Stallings + San Diego