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Twitter Usage In America: 2010 is a new report derived from the Edison Research/Arbitron Internet and Multimedia Series. This study presents three years of tracking data from a nationally representative telephone survey (via landline and mobile phone) of 1,753 Americans, and was conducted in February 2010.

This report details new data on the awareness and usage of Twitter, along with user demographics, status updating behaviors, brand following activity and even an early look at location-based social networking. The study was originally presented on Thursday, April 29th, in an online presentation.

Highlights of the study include:

Marketing a product successfully isn’t easy. But, it just got easier. Listen as Blog Talk Radio host, Liz Lynch, interviews John Follis about his effective Marketing Therapy program. John also discusses the value of “G-Cred”, guerrilla marketing, creating buzz, small business branding, and why working with a web, SEO or social media specialist can actually be detrimental to your business.

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The past decade saw a seismic shift in marketing communications as blogs, podcasts, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter led the media evolution. It’s an exciting time. Yet, with this cool evolution the focus on a clear, compelling company or product message has often been devalued. In many cases the over-reliance on media and technology has shifted the focus away from the resolving the key (and usually tough) marketing issues necessary for growing a successful business.

The most successful companies and organizations (Apple, Google, Team Obama, etc) work with top, independent marketing firms and experts to help them develop and maintain a strong brand message realizing that the media and technology is only a tool to help them get their message out.

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A blog has many benefits for any business, and by clicking the “blogging”category link in the nav bar on the right you can read all about them. But there’s one blog benefit that applies to anyone… It’s empowering.

Blogs and Social Media (YouTube, Twitter, etc) have given the “Daniels” of the world something potent to use against  business “Goliaths” who BB (before blogs) could get away with some pretty irresponsible stuff. And, by “Goliath” I don’t just mean a huge corporate giant. It could also be a badly behaved doctor… like Dr. Joan Gerwitz, a Stamford, CT  ophthalmologist who I saw this week. Without going into unnecessary detail my experience with Dr. Joan Gerwitz was not a good one and I’d hate for anyone seeking a Stamford, CT  ophthalmologist to experience what I did.

Whether, or not, this post about Dr. Joan Gerwitz will make a difference is questionable. But, just knowing that it could makes me feel a helluva lot better.

That is the question. Is it a useful tool, or not? What’s your take?

Question of the Week:

How many people do you think really follow those whom they claim to be following? Or, are they “following” primarily as an ego-fueled attempt to try to get more followers for perception value?

from eMarketer.com / May ’09:

Call it the Oprah Effect. Or maybe it was all the publicity generated by the Ashton Kutcher/Ted Turner race to reach a million followers. Whatever the cause, there is a growing fear that the mammoth microblogging site may be overexposed, overhyped and underused.

It is true that Twitter’s growth is skyrocketing. No one argues that. eMarketer estimates there will be over 12 million Twitter users in the US in 2009, slightly more than twice last year’s number.

But figures released by Nielsen Online suggest that Twitter’s retention rate is only 40%. In other words, as David Martin wrote on the Nielsen blog, “Currently, more than 60% of US Twitter users fail to return the following month.” Not so good.

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