In the first instance, the report confirmed that social media use and blog consumption are both on the rise in the US. The number of Facebook users climbed from 80% of online Americans last year to 87% this year, closing the gap between Facebookers and consumers of offline television (93%). BlogHer also found that 40% of online Americans read blogs (up from 37% in 2010) and 22% use Twitter (up from 16% last year).

A striking trend revealed by the study is the impact that blogs now have on online shopping habits. Around half (53%) of respondents (88% of those who describe themselves as active blog readers) said that they trust the information supplied in blogs that they visit regularly, with nearly one-quarter of the US population (24%) indicating that they make purchases based on blog content – rising to 53% of active blog readers.

What’s more, women tend to respond better to endorsements by trusted bloggers than by well-known celebrities when it comes to learning more about a product or making a purchase.

It’s worth noting that blogs and Facebook combine to form a powerful media pairing for BlogHer’s respondents, who cited both as the media channels that they consume regularly and are ‘passionate’ about. Integrating a business blog into a multi-faceted social media strategy is one potentially effective method of reaching this audience where they are most engaged.

BlogHer’s fourth annual study into women’s social media use patterns compared two samples: one comprised of women from the general population (via partner Nielsen) and one gathered from the BlogHer community of active blog consumers.

Captain’s blog, stardate 23.9.10

While the Johnny-come-latelys of online marketing -Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare have got all the attention in recent years,  the blogs which often supply them – online content ‘motherships’ if you will, have quietly moved into the publishing  mainstream.

A new report from eMarketer shows that 60% of the US online population will be reading blogs by 2014, a rise of 15% since 2008.

By way of contrast, over the same period, the number of bloggers has only increased by 2% to 13.3%.

This seems strange in a way, if the medium is growing in influence, why aren’t bloggers rushing to grab the opportunity to have their voice heard? The answer is probably just that is is hard to maintain a good quality blog, even for those who like writing them.

When I speak to companies about blog management, their comments often echo this – they know blogs are important but they just can’t see where the content will come from and rather than have a rubbish blog, they’d prefer to have no blog at all.

The solution we propose is divert some of the PR budget to the blog and outsource to a PR agent that understands online, who can manage your blog in the same way any online publication is managed, using professional writers and journalists creating credible, branded content. Create an editorial agenda, include keywords to boost SEO and then start marketing that content though social media.

Stick some analytics behind it and watch the smiles at the next marketing meeting when visitor numbers jump!

B2B marketers are equally split in their take up of blogs and social media and are bottom line focussed, a US survey has found.

50% of B2B marketers in the Genius.com/BtoB magazine survey said they don’t blog, 49% don’t use Twitter, 43% don’t use Facebook and 25% don’t use LinkedIn.

Many are also not using Adwords or SEO tools.

The key success measurement for B2B marketers is revenue, with 61% focussed on revenue generation, followed by sales agreements (40%) and qualified leads (39%).

Over five times more marketers cite revenue generation as a key metric than they do website traffic or impressions (12%) or click-through rates (12%).

The findings suggest that a company blog is more important as a new business tool than was previously thought.

First time visitors come from two major sources, referring sites and search engines, confirming that good quality content that is keyword optimised, will pull traffic to company sales funnels.

Research amongst Furlong PR customers suggests that 75% of blog traffic comes from social networking sites and 25% from SEO.

Compendium’s survey also looked at use of Twitter. Approximately 43 percent of companies surveyed had established a Twitter account.

Twitter usage was highest among B-to-B companies with 87 percent maintaining an account.

So here you have the odd scencario of one of the newest and most popular marketing channels – video, being used to organise undoubtedly the least popular and most old school marketing channels - cold calling.

This only added to my growing suspicion that political parties think online marketing is a type of intranet for posting information  and instructions to the party machine rather than an engagement tool for reaching voters.

Once I’d got beyond that landing page though there was clearly more to it than rallying the troops. There’s plenty of use of video for surely its main political purpose - candidate speeches plus lots of opportunities to engage through email newsletters and social media sites like Facebook and Flickr along with a blog to add comments to.

Go on to the Labour party site and it looks like they’re trying to recreate a print brochure online . The links for conference speeches go not to video, but to text.

Both parties are aware of Obama’s success in reaching out to voters online and based on this evidence, the Conservatives are winning the race to recreate that winning formula.