What emerges after the storm has passed will be an advertising and media industry with a fundamentally different structure. The vast majority of advertisers are boosting their online spend, while heavily cutting classic media. Social networks continue to leap forward - with Facebook putting on 50m new customers since January to cross the 200m mark - and the race to own the mobile space has never been faster. Online ad expenditure up 17% to reach £3.35bn Many thanks to Danny Meadows-Klue at Digital Stategy Consulting for his regular news round-up, which I've selected from here.

From the introduction : “Some telling findings from the latest twice-yearly Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey of over 25,000 online consumers from 50 countries: “Recommendations by personal acquaintances and opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of advertising globally. There are many more research studies, findings, dissertations, and so on that confirm the same fact: reviewing is the new advertising. businesses have to understand and accept that consumers’ decision making processes, which ultimately come down to whether they will buy from you or from someone else, have truly shifted to a new, powerful peer-to-peer arena.

We’ve just published our latest white paper, Interaction in Advertising , which is summarised below. The paper examines how advertising is evolving from a one-way communicative process (the advertiser telling the consumer what they should be thinking), to a more collaborative, engaging format where brand and consumer communicate with an open dialogue. The paper discusses examples of campaigns that are putting interaction in advertising into practice and highlights Included in the paper: From ‘interactive’ to ‘interaction’ Brands are switching from paid display advertising to promoting themselves through branded online communities, virtual worlds/games and social media.

Callan Green has just published a great post on Mashable about brands who are really getting it right in Facebook Fan Pages. To make the most of Facebook Fan pages (or Bebo, any other social network), you need to actively engage with your fans. From eModeration’s recent white paper Using Community and Interactive Advertising to Engage Tweens and Teens : Carol Phillips, in her blog ‘Millennial marketing’ explains why ‘ brands make poor friends’ Sure, she says, “anyone can build a fan page in under 10 minutes, and some big brands may even attract fans without any real effort.

However, in this article I discuss the use of Facebook for building your list. On Facebook , friends, page fans and followers of various applications, such as NetworkedBlogs , all belong to your list, and all receive communications from you in one form or another. If Facebook would enable you to have an unlimited number of friends, you could probably get along without fans and followers. I have already written List Building Using Ning Social Networks and List Building Using Twitter . I

Well, the number of Australians on Facebook has shot through the roof. If you hunt through this blog, you’ll notice that I’ve been tracking Facebook users in Australia since May 2007 (around 200,000 members I think) to today and 1/3 of Australian population. Here’s the description of a Monthly Active Use r according to Facebook, as well as the August figures for Australians on Facebook. After sitting on 6 million for a while, we have 7,900,000 monthly active users, 6,900,000 over 18 years old. That’s quite a jump.

Research released by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) in the UK suggests that people are growing increasingly tired of requests to join brand pages or install brand applications in Facebook and other social networks . The second most cited dislike (16% of respondents) was advertising that “isn’t relevant to me”. The research found that almost two in every three of the 2,000 respondents to the survey were fed up with the constant requests to join groups and try new applications. Digging deeper into the research reveals more information.

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The biggest group on Facebook are not university or college students, or even people in their 20s in their first job. According to analysis by iStrategyLabs , the biggest group of users on Facebook are 35-54 year olds. Their study of figures for the US that are publicly available to advertisers shows that over 28% of Facebook users are in this age-range, with a further 12% of users aged 55 or over. Image via Wikipedia In fact the 55+ age-group is the one that has seen the largest growth in the six month to July 2009 – an impressive 514% increase in

This morning, as you do when you quietly settle in at your desk and get prepared for a long day at work, I logged in to Facebook to check what my social circle around the world is up to. For whatever reason, my eyes fell on the forbidden spot, the advertising in the right hand corner. But I cannot blame him for Facebook’s & Vodafone’s dishonest exploitation of your personal Oh wait, I know why. It was ’speaking’ to me: