FORRESTER RESEARCH — Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs) have been all over the media lately. Foursquare hit 2 million users. Twitter launched, revamped, and re-launched Places. CNNMoney partnered with Gowalla around their popular annual "100 Best Places to Live" list. There’s even a social experiment – PleaseRobMe - that was started in response to the hype around this new social sharing technology. So it’s no surprise that we’ve been getting a lot more questions from marketers lately about these services. Marketers want to know who’s using these services, how often they’re using them, what they’re using them for, how marketers can get involved, and if they should. We dug into our research to try to answer these questions and at a high level, what we found is that just 1% of US online adults are using LBSNs weekly, while 4% of them have tried them at least once...

FORRESTER RESEARCH — Apple reinvented the distribution of products and services on mobile phones, opening up direct-to-consumer opportunities for nontelecom companies. The numbers look impressive -- more than 5 billion downloads and $1 billion paid to developers in the two years since the launch of the Apple App Store. However, it also generated $429 million for Apple itself in two years. These revenues are not meaningful to Apple’s core revenues. Due to the limited number of paid apps and their significant concentration among games and navigation apps, it is likely that a significant number of independent developers have not recouped their investments via the current revenue-sharing model. The recent launch of iAd is a way for Apple to maintain the attractiveness of its platform, allowing third parties that provide free apps to develop sustainable business models. But, despite all the hype around apps, only a minority of consumers download them monthly...

FORRESTER RESEARCH — Most companies are now building a social media strategy, with a presence on Facebook, twitter or/and YouTube. At the same time there's lots of debate on the value of a 'Facebook fan'. In this whole discussion I was wondering who are most likely to become a fan of a brand? Our Technographics survey data shows that about 13% of European online adults have become "fan" of a brand, company, or product they liked recently. About 10% were interested in interacting with companies through social media but haven’t done so yet. The first group we called "brand fans," the other "aspiring brand fans." How do the two compare?...

FORRESTER RESEARCH — Brands are making plenty of money in social media: Dell Outlet’s Twitter account has generated millions for Dell, the Intel Channel Voice community has decreased costs by eliminating the need for expensive in-person events, and P&G used media mix modeling to demonstrate that the BeingGirl.com community is several times more effective at driving sales than the brands' television ads. Many marketers can draw a straight line between investments in social media marketing and financial results, but many more cannot. This doesn’t mean social media marketing is ineffective; it just means that marketers have to recognize benefits beyond dollars and cents...

FORRESTER RESEARCH — Social media analytics is one of the most exciting new frontiers in business intelligence (BI). As I noted in a recent blogpost, it refers to the application of BI tools, such as reporting, dashboarding, visualization, search, event-driven alerting, and text mining, to information that originates as messages streaming from social media such as Twitter and Facebook. Forrester sees growing adoption of social media analytics across the entire customer relationship management (CRM) lifecycle...