EMARKETER — Overall, US business-to-business (B2B) advertising and marketing spending will increase by a tiny 0.8% this year, to $129 billion, according to Outsell’s "Annual Advertising and Marketing Study 2010." Interactive spending will climb a more encouraging 9.2%, to $51.5 billion. B2B marketers will increase spending on some interactive tactics significantly more than average. Marketing spending on social networking sites is predicted to rise 43.3%...

MASHABLE — Twitterers mostly consume news, MySpace users want games and entertainment, Facebookers are into both news and community and Digg’s audience has a mixed bag of interests. This is all according to online advertising network Chitika, who set out to analyze the interests of MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and Digg users by comparing the genres of sites that receive traffic from these social networks. 287,090 impressions were used in the report, and based on this research, each social site has a distinct makeup of users with unique tastes. The graphic below breaks it down...

HUBSPOT INBOUND INTERNET MARKETING BLOG — For those of you still hesitant to launch your brand's involvement in social media, here's another wake-up call: A new study released by Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies surveyed over 1,500 people to reveal that people are more likely to purchase and recommend products/services from brands they follow in social media. Specifically...

SOCIAL MEDIA EXAMINER — Sure, social media takes a lot of time. Merging Facebook, Twitter and all the other social media options can be challenging. But what if you could cut that time down significantly by cross-leveraging content? Too many companies are reinventing the content wheel for every social outpost they maintain. A better approach is to create a content ecosystem that allows you to repurpose and cascade your best information. Instead of a series of self-contained initiatives, build yourself a content ladder. Here are 5 steps to get there...

MANAGINGCOMMUNITIES.COM — This is part 3, the final part, in my Alex inspired series on temporary bans, lifting them early and related topics. I’m going to close it out by talking about how to respond to members who want to be unbanned...

DAN ZARRELLA.COM — If you’re familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the title of this post will ring a bell. I first began to formulate this framework as a model for understanding how ReTweets work. (If you’re interested in my Science of ReTweets study, check out my live webinar Friday.) My hierarchy is a framework for understanding criteria required for an individual to share a piece of content. Each of these criteria has a corresponding action we as marketers can take to increase the contagiousness of our content and ideas. As you can see there are three criteria and together they form a funnel of decrease volumes, like a sales conversion rate funnel...

PORTFOLIO.COM — Twitter represents a gold mine of marketing possibilities, but the vast majority of firms haven’t figured out how to transform those 140-character tweets into sales. One exception is mega-brand Dunkin’ Donuts, which has started to track dollars flowing from Twitter by tallying the number of people who click through from a "Win Free Coffee for a Year Offer" on Twitter. Users who enroll in the "DD Perks" program are entered into a company database. The company has a quantitative value for database members, although it will not disclose that number or the Twitter click-through rate...