SYSOMOS BLOG — There is little doubt that the consumption of online videos is red-hot. Reports from comScore and Nielsen suggest that 33.2 billion online videos were viewed during in December 2009, and the average U.S. Internet user watched more than 190 minutes of video. We wanted to learn more about how YouTube videos are being used. In this report, we focus on YouTube video engagement and, in particular, we aim to understand how the blogosphere embeds and provides links to different videos...

VATORNEWS — In Part One of our Social Media Marketing Series, we covered the fundamentals. What follows is a checklist of great social sites to leverage along with how to get it going and the content you can put into each spot: If you haven’t done it already, create a Facebook Page for your business (type “Facebook Pages” into the search box when in your personal Facebook account page to find the section, and then click on the “+ Create Page” button to get started). Once this is done, the obvious next step is to get people to become “Fans” of your business...

ALL FACEBOOK — As many of our readers have noticed over the past few weeks, Facebook videos now include a feature which lets you become a fan of a Facebook Page while watching the video. The power of this feature cannot be understated as a video which includes a call to action, is much more valuable than a video by itself. If you want to drive new fans to your Facebook Page, this feature combined with high quality content is priceless...

ADVERTISING AGE — Technology's influence is widely assumed to have morphed the over-the-fence backyard chat into mommy blogs and Twitter networks. But when moms are seeking product advice, it's not all social-media all the time. A study due out next week from the Parenting Group found that while moms are avid web and social-media users, they still turn to family and friends first, whether by phone, e-mail or in-person, when making decisions about product purchases...

ADVERTISING AGE — Recently, Advertising Age reported on the 400% surge in mobile video uploads to YouTube, attributed to the new iPhone 3GS. Beyond the implications of what that may mean for the value of ad inventory on YouTube, one thing is clear: There is an inseparable link between social media and mobile devices. As the capabilities of these devices expand, we can expect that updating social-network sites via mobile will continue to increase and may eventually even surpass the wired web. Social networks like Twitter and Facebook are remarkably dependent on mobile access for the value they provide to their users. I would also argue that mobile status updates are, by their very nature, timelier, more relevant and potentially more interesting to their readers...