MEDIAPOST — Apple's latest earnings report showed the iPhone continues to power the company's growth, with profit up 78% from a year ago and revenue up 61% to $15.7 billion. And that's including only two days of iPhone 4 sales before the end of Apple's fiscal third quarter. The company has said it has sold 3 million of the devices so far, despite the controversy surrounding its antenna reception problem. But a new Yankee Group study focuses not so much on how many people are using the iPhone as who, and how they're using it. With an average age of 32 and household income of $100,000, iPhone owners represent an attractive demographic for mobile advertisers and operators. Other smartphone owners, by comparison, are 34 on average with income of $85,000...

EMARKETER — Retailers seem to be working hard to socialize shopping; according to the e-tailing group, more than nine in 10 are planning a Facebook presence by the end of the year. But social media still gets only a tiny slice of retailers’ online marketing budgets. Online merchants with annual sales of more than $100 million devote just 1% of their total marketing budget to social, compared with 39% that goes to paid search, according to Shop.org’s "The State of Retailing Online 2010" report...

EMARKETER — While many marketers struggle with how to measure social media marketing return on investment, some businesses are finding at least one hard metric where their efforts have paid off -- customer acquisition. According to a February–March 2010 survey from office services firm Regus, smaller companies see the most success, with nearly half of small businesses around the world having acquired a customer through social networks...

DIGITAL CONNECTIONS — Up next in our summer mobile series (this is our fifth installment) is a report on mobile applications. Applications have become an enduring form of mobile media, thanks in large part to the ease of buying apps from Apple’s App Store and the increasing usage of apps on Google Android handsets. With apps’ popularity come new challenges for marketers, as consumers’ attention is split between apps and the mobile web. Marketers will have to prioritize and make tough decisions when allocating finite resources...

THE SOCIAL TIMES — A new survey [pdf] commissioned by workplace solutions provider Regus revealed that 40% of businesses globally have successfully leveraged social media tools for business development. For US companies, that figure is 35%, below the level of many nations with significantly smaller overall economies and placing it 9th overall. The Regus survey asked business leaders not only whether they had achieved any customer wins using social networking, but also whether they believed the channel was effective enough to be awarded its own portion of marketing budget...