While the demographics of the average social media user mirror the average U.S. adult (i.e., everyone’s socializing online in some way), a recent Retail Advertising and Marketing Association survey conducted by BIGresearch shows types of social media use vary greatly by age and gender. The survey, “Social Media: An Inside Look at the People Who Use It”, compares U.S. users on the social Web to the average American adult. But even with all the Twitter chitchat, Facebook fan groups, and blogs to be followed, consumers believe face-to-face communication is the most powerful.

Here are some interesting graphs from the report — mouse over them to see the underlying details:

View the full research report (PDF)

View the raw research data comparing social media users to U.S. adults 18+ (PDF)

View the raw research data comparing all social media user demographics (PDF)

Takeaways from the report:

• 70% of social media users between the ages of 18-34 regularly use Facebook more than other sites such as MySpace, Twitter, and Classmates.com
• 72% of social media users say that after an online search, they communicate with others about a product or service with face-to-face communication
• More people who use social media prefer to give advice about a product or service rather than receive it
• Social media users are more likely to use other new media compared to adults 18+
• 71% of female social media users regularly use Facebook, compared to 61% of males
• More men than women prefer to communicate with others via a cell phone conversation after searching for a product or service online

Here’s a collection of terrific social media infographics that might come in handy. As you probably know, infographics are visual representations of information, data, or knowledge. They illustrate information that would be unwieldy in text form and they act as a kind of visual shorthand, making information easy to understand and consume. They are driven by the same information as charts, but they’re often a better form of communication because of their pleasant aesthetics — charts and graphs can communicate data, but infographics turn data into information.

It’s very helpful to use infographics in presentations, reports, articles, etc., to convey concepts. Instead of poring over figures and long reports to decipher data, an infographic can immediately explain what the data actually means.

Most of these have been scaled down or cropped. Each one has been linked to the original, so please visit the links to view them full-size.

If you know of any good ones that I’ve missed, please leave a comment and let me know!

1. The Social Engagement Spectrum

2. 10 Levels of Intimacy in Today’s Communication

3. The Social Media Effect

4. Social Marketing Compass

5. Facebook vs. Twitter

6. Balance Your Media Diet

7. Social Media Statistics

8. Social Web Involvement

9. The Spectrum of Online Friendship

10. How People Share Content on the Web

11. Donut Marketing

12. Twitter Territory

13. Twitter PR Strategy

14. The Journey of a Tweet

15. The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions

16. When Social Media Attacks

17. The Art of Listening

18. The Conversation Prism

19. Word of Mouth Visualized

20. Social Web Reputation Management Cycles

21. Twitter Statistics

22. The Story (So Far) of Twitter

23. Who Participates Online

24. Gender Balance on Social Networking Sites

25. Building a Company With Social Media

26. The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits—to You

27. Social Media Spending

28. The Facebook Juggernaut

29. Twitter Perceptions of Google Buzz Over Time

30. Breakdown of the Blogosphere

31. Visualizing 6 Years of Facebook

32. The Boom of Social Sites

33. Age Distribution of Social Sites

34. Make Social Media Work for Your Company

35. The World Map of Social Networks

Here’s a BlogWell presentation by GasPedal CEO Andy Sernovitz that recaps the latest FTC regulations on disclosure and social media. He teaches Word of Mouth Marketing at Northwestern, taught Entrepreneurship at the Wharton School of Business, ran a business incubator, and has started half a dozen companies. GasPedal is his consulting company, where he advises great brands like TiVo, Dell, Ralph Lauren, Sprint, and Kimberly-Clark on best practices.

Sernovitz covers the 10 magic words of proper online disclosure, his specific steps for keeping your brand safe under the latest FTC regulations, and his personal tips for staying ethical and legal. He always puts ethics and dis­clo­sure front and cen­ter when he speaks on this topic: “The num­ber one issue around ethics comes down to dis­clo­sure — being hon­est about your true iden­tity.” Dis­clo­sure is essen­tial and easy but requires edu­ca­tion: “You don’t tack on a dis­clo­sure state­ment later, you start with that. You start with ethics and that’s how you lead.” It’s not only the right thing to do, but “it’s essen­tial as a way to stay out of trou­ble. Almost every social media scan­dal involv­ing brands boils down to a lack of dis­clo­sure. The blo­gos­phere expects to know your motivations.”

Takeaways

• This isn’t a debate among experts, it’s the law. The rules are clear, and the FTC will be cracking down. If you recruit people to blog about you, you’re responsible for the content.
• Everything begins with ethics. Ethics is the foundation of a social media program. It’s not what you add later; it’s what everything else is built on.
• Your biggest risk is a failure to properly train your team. Most companies don’t set out to launch a stealth marketing campaign. The scandals happen again and again from well-meaning employees who just don’t know it’s wrong.
• The “10 magic words” for employ­ees ven­tur­ing onto the social Web: “I work for X, and this is my per­sonal opin­ion.” That dis­claimer goes a long way in help­ing to sep­a­rate offi­cial com­pany pol­icy from an employee’s per­sonal views.
• Grab a copy of the Disclosure Best Practices Toolkit below. You could use it as the basis for a full-blown pol­icy that comes out of cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tions, make it part of your company’s employee hand­book, or use it as a set of infor­mal guide­lines for your depart­ment or team.

Watch the presentation and follow along with the slides below:

Dis­clo­sure Best Prac­tices Toolkit

The Social Media Busi­ness Coun­cil, of which Ser­novitz is CEO,  has cre­ated a Dis­clo­sure Best Prac­tices Toolkit — a handy and essen­tial resource for any com­pany involved in social media. This is not an impe­ri­ous one-size-fits-all list of must-dos — “we’re not a stan­dards body or trade asso­ci­a­tion,” as Ser­novitz says. Instead, it’s an open source toolkit to help you build your social media policy. “Adapt it to your com­pany, teach your team, improve, and share,” he adds.

Down­load the 10-page tookit as a single document (Word docx) or view each section individually online:

• How to use
• FAQ
• Cre­ative Com­mons License
• Check­list 1: Dis­clo­sure of Identity
• Check­list 2: Personal/Unofficial Blog­ging and Outreach
• Check­list 3: Blog­ger Relations
• Check­list 4: Com­pen­sa­tion and Incentives
• Check­list 5: Agency and Con­trac­tor Disclosure
• Check­list 6: Cre­ative Flexibility

What steps has your company or organization taken to embrace disclosure?

More and more business and organizations are beginning to realize that Twitter is an excellent (and free) way for them to monitor how people feel about their brand, company, or product. With users pouring out their thoughts in 140-character bursts, a great deal of discussion revolves around products and services. These tweets are very relevant because other consumers can read and be affected by them.

So it’s important to know how to track your brand or products (and those of your competitors) on Twitter.

This great video tutorial offers some simple techniques to get you started. It was created by by John Haydon. His company, Inbound Zombie, helps small businesses and nonprofits get more customers, build communities, and increase awareness. He’s also a contributor at SocialBrite.

He demonstrates how to create saved searches for:

• Your name
• Your username
• Your brand
• Your competitors
• Keywords related to your industry

He also explains how to:

• Use Backtweets to track URL mentions
• Get to know the advanced search option on Twitter
• Search from, to, and/or about users, search by location, etc.
• Create RSS feeds for your Twitter search results
• Create e-mail alerts for your Twitter search results using TweetBeep

If you educate yourself about how they work, search engines will become one of your most valuable tools.

Have you used Twitter Search to monitor your brand? What about Backtweets or TweetBeep? Please share your experience…

(Image: Matt Hamm)

Where should you go to reach your target market via social media? It depends on who your customers are.

Here are some recent demographics for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. By tailoring your marketing strategies to dovetail with statistics like these, you can maximize the effectiveness of your social media efforts and focus on reaching your desired audience. And if your goal is to reach a wide variety of users of all ages, incomes, and education levels, you can do so by using all three. Compare your target audience with this data:

Facebook Users:

• 116 million unique U.S. visitors in December 2009
• follow the Internet average pretty closely in terms of affluence, education, and household size
• are slightly more female
• are mostly younger, aged 13-34

LinkedIn Users:

• 24 million unique U.S. visitors in December 2009
• are slightly more male
• mostly have at least a college education
• … and an astounding 33% have a graduate degree, as compared to the Internet average of 21%
• are generally older, more educated, and more affluent

Twitter Users:

• 23 million unique U.S. visitors in December 2009
• reflect an even male/female ratio
• peak at the 18-34 age group (16% of its total users, compared to 8% of the total Internet audience), with an even number of older and younger users.
• are generally less wealthy than those on Facebook and LinkedIn

(Via Business Insider)
(Photo: Matt Hamm)

Adam Schoenfeld, CEO at 20 Decibels (Cheddr Media Inc.), assembled this terrific list of social media statistics and anecdotes. His company offers a great Twitter campaign management and analytics tool for social media managers and agencies.

The presentation includes highlights from numerous reports and studies that demonstrate the rapid adoption of social media for marketing and outreach, including spending projections, penetration estimates, survey data, and specific examples covering all types of businesses. There is a slant toward Twitter due to the company’s focus, but the collection covers the general trends in social media adoption:

Takeaways:

1. Social media spending is expected to increase from $716 million in 2008 to $3.1 billion in 2014, a 34% compound annual growth rate (CAGR).
2. That 34% CAGR means that social media spending is growing faster than any other interactive marketing category (more).
3. In the near-term, 86% of marketers plan to increase social media budgets in 2010 and 13% are planning to keep the same level of budget (more).
4. Pepsi dropped TV advertising for the 2010 Super Bowl after 23 years. Instead, they’re investing in a $20 million social media campaign. (more).
5. Best Buy has over 2,500 employees helping customers via Twitter as part of their Twelpforce initiative.
6. Best Buy even purchased TV ads to drive awareness for their Twitter initiative. (Traditional media as the supporting channel and social media as the core channel.)
7. Comcast has at least 11 full-time employees dedicated to customer service and support via social media.
8. Dell has attributed over $6.5 million in revenue directly to Twitter (more).
9. 99% of online retailers plan to have a Facebook Page by 2011 and 91% plan to have a Twitter page (more).
10. Social media played a major role in 2009 holiday shopping — 28% of U.S. shoppers say social media has influenced their purchases (more).
11. JetBlue Web site visitors who also visited Twitter in July 2009 were 35% more likely to complete a booking than visitors who did not visit Twitter (more).
12. In 2009, 91% of Inc. 500 companies report using at least one social media tool, compared with 77% of companies surveyed in 2008.
13. In 2009, 52% of the Inc. 500 used Twitter, the second most commonly used social media channel. It wasn’t even present in 2007 (more).
14. 53% of the Fortune 500 have at least one active Twitter account.
15. 57% of the Fortune 100 have at least one active Twitter account.
16. 13% of the Fortune 100 have at least two active Twitter accounts.
17. 83% of CMOs are tracking their number of fans in social media.
18. 72% of CMOs plan to attach revenue expectations to their social media spending in 2010.
19. 81% of CMOs plan to link up to 10% of their company’s revenues to social media investment next year, up from just 44% in 2009 (more).
20. 88% of execs at U.S. nonprofit organizations are currently experimenting with social media (more).
21. Small businesses are catching on, too — 68% will increase their social media marketing efforts in the next year (more).
22. ~56% of Twitter users say they use the microblogging and communication service for business purposes (more).
23. Social media usage is taking hold at both B2B and B2C business — 81% of B2B and 57% of B2C businesses maintain company-related profiles on social networks.
24. Over 40% of people have “friended” a brand on Facebook or MySpace (more).
25. 20% of tweets are about products such as invitations for product information, answers or responses from peers, or directly communication by brand representatives (more).
26. 46% of Facebook users say they would talk about or recommend a product on Facebook.
27. 44% of Twitter users have recommended a product (more).
28. 58% of people said if they tweet about a bad experience, they would like the company to respond to their comment (more).
29. Foursquare’s estimated valuation is $6 million (more).
30. Twitter’s estimated valuation is $1 billion (more).
31. Facebook’s estimated valuation is upwards of $10 billion (more).

(Via 20 Decibels)

This post was written by Jeremy Victor, the founder of Make Good Media and Editor In Chief of B2Bbloggers.com. B2Bbloggers.com is an online magazine for B2B marketers. Their goal is to engage, educate, and make it easier for B2B marketers to find the information they care about to do their jobs successfully.

For the past several months, I have followed @JeffreyHayzlett on Twitter. Some days reading every tweet to get a sense of life as a CMO for a global B2B/B2C brand, other times just checking in to see where in the world Jeffrey may be. If you follow Jeffrey, you’ll get first hand experience of the future as a Chief Marketing Officer. Whether it be on a trip back to South Dakota or in Spain (as he is at the time of this writing), he is constantly engaging, educating, exciting, and evangelizing the Kodak brand. Jeffrey Hayzlett is a new media CMO and as you’ll learn in this exclusive interview, a smart marketer.

This interview itself is also a symbol of the rapid state of evolution we are experiencing in communications and media. Jeffrey and I met via Twitter with a simple follow, follow back, direct message and the rest you’ll read below as Jeffrey shares his thoughts on marketing, the recession, social media, and the changing nature of B2B marketing. Enjoy!

Jeremy: What brands do you admire? Why?

Jeffrey: There are a number of brands I admire from a personal perspective based on the connections that I make with them as an enthusiast of their products and the connections that the brands make with me as a customer. They’re brands that represent a promise delivered. I love brands like Cabela’s for their attention to the customer, the way they deliver great customer experiences, and the activities they promote.

I also admire more familiar brands, like Coca-Cola and Apple — people know who they are because the brands know who they are. They’ve delivered affinity and become iconic.

Also, living in upstate New York, I’ve come to really appreciate the Wegmans supermarket chain, and Fresh Direct, an online grocer out of New York — they’ve done exceptional jobs in enhancing their bonds with customers.

Jeremy: Read any good business books lately?

Jeffrey: I’m a prolific reader. I read multiple books every week, and usually am reading multiple books at one time. I just read “Betrayal,” by Andrew Kirtzman, about the Bernie Madoff scandal. I was struck by how long he was able to keep the fraud going because people wanted so much to believe the good things they thought were happening.

Jeremy: You are an early adopter of social media. How’d that happen? What made you notice?

Jeffrey: I started using social media almost immediately after it was introduced as a means to keep in touch with family and friends. From a business standpoint, I was fascinated by the opportunities that social media makes possible to reach many of Kodak’s customers at the same time, which is how marketing has traditionally worked — through a medium that reaches people in a personalized way, which is what marketing today and in the future is all about. And, maybe even more important, not just reach customers but make a connection between them and the Kodak brand. We have people throughout the company who are actively using social media to achieve what we call “Kodak’s 4 E’s: Engage, Educate, Excite and Evangelize.”

Jeremy: One of the things I have been saying is that 2009 was about survival and 2010 is about renewal…would you agree?

Jeffrey: 2009 might not have been quite that dire but it certainly changed forever the dynamics of the markets and industries that practically every company operates in. Companies need to recognize that many things aren’t going to return to the way they were before the recession. That’s true for Kodak and certainly true for our B2B customers in the commercial print market. As advertising budgets were reduced, print certainly took a hit. This reduction in print spend accelerated a trend that had already started of printers rethinking their business model to focus on offering more integrated marketing services beyond putting ink on paper. I see the new world in which we all live as a positive opportunity for companies to move in different directions, offer new products and capabilities, and create the business they really want to be in.

Jeremy: What are the core areas of renewal for Kodak in 2010?

Jeffrey: As a digital company, we like to think of renewal as a continuing process. For example, we have to move faster than ever in the ways we innovate and communicate. In 2010, we’ll focus a lot of our B2B efforts around helping commercial print service providers renew their businesses and become marketing services providers through our digital technologies. At the forefront of that effort, we’re launching the KODAK PROSPER Printers featuring Kodak Stream technology, a groundbreaking inkjet printing technology that will take print to previously unattainable levels.

As I mentioned already, marketing today is all about reaching people on a 1:1 basis. With customers in full control of how, when and where you can engage them, marketers need to use a full digital communications mix that is relevant, timely and personal. What we’re doing with Stream is, for the first time, putting print on a level of scale, personalization and interactivity that is comparable to online media. By offering this digital print capability, print service providers can help marketers achieve what’s most important to them — an integrated digital campaign that delivers strong return on marketing investment.

Jeremy: What are some of the biggest challenges/opportunities you foresee for marketers/corporations as the economy (hopefully) rebounds in 2010?

Jeffrey: Given the cautious environment that companies will operate in this year, the challenge for marketers is reaching purchasers and influencers in a way that will convince them to spend with you. As part of achieving that goal, marketers need to figure out the right mix of media, events and other tools to reach customers on a personal level. The big opportunity for marketers lies in rethinking the value that their products, technologies and services bring to customers. In almost all cases, it should come down to answering this question: Does our marketing clearly communicate what our products deliver to help customers grow their businesses?

Jeremy: Kodak’s social initiatives seem to be much larger than “social media” – what I mean by that is that it seems Kodak is becoming a social business … not just Tweeting. Am I right?

Jeffrey: Absolutely. Social media fits into our overall strategy of connecting with customers on a personal level. For many people, their daily routines include participating on Twitter and Facebook. We want Kodak to be there with them. I’m challenging our team everyday to come up with new ways to engage with customers and facilitate conversations. On the consumer side of our business, we recently held a contest through Twitter for people to name our new high-definition pocket video camera, the new KODAK PLAYSPORT. Whenever we participate in a major trade show — on the commercial or consumer side of the business — we include a “K-Zone.” K-Zones are a great way to share topics that are important to our audiences — trends, issues, applications, and success stories. It’s not talking about us. It’s talking about what we can learn from the experiences of others. Those sessions are broadcast live over the Internet and videos of the discussions posted online. It’s all about bringing people together around shared interests and reaching them in way that’s meaningful and memorable.

Jeremy: What advice do you have for your fellow CMOs getting ready to walk in your shoes?

Jeffrey: First, get ready to do a lot of listening. Whenever I start a new project or initiative, I make sure I’ve gotten as much input and understanding from everyone involved. Many people talk about the importance of listening but I’m not sure everyone really does it well. Second, think ahead. Everything you’ve heard about how quickly the world changes in every sense of the word is true. You have to anticipate what’s next before your competition. Third, create momentum. Big ideas and routine tactics need to work together to raise visibility and awareness that builds to actions and results. If something doesn’t contribute to that momentum, don’t do it. Finally, and most important, do everything FAST. FAST is a core set of operating principles that drive everything we do at Kodak: Focus, Accountability, Simplicity and Trust.

Jeremy: Of course the main concern on a CMO’s mind relative to anything “social” is ROI and measurement of success or failure. What are the key performance indicators that Kodak uses to measure and monitor the success of your social media initiatives?

Jeffrey: When we look at the Kodak 4 E’s of social media (Engage, Educate, Excite and Evangelize), we look at the first one, Engage, as the way to begin the process of achieving success with social media and as the way to measure our success. We can Tweet and post all day but if we haven’t engaged anyone, we haven’t been successful. So, engagement is the new ROI. We look at quantitative data via measurement tools like Radian6 to analyze the extent and type of engagement we’ve achieved with our constituents. Another way to answer the question is to think about ROI as meaning something else — what is your Risk of Ignoring?

Jeremy: Name the three top social networking sites you are using and your goal for each one of them?

Jeffrey: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. The goal for each is the same: to engage in meaningful dialogue with customers and influencers in a way that supports the Kodak brand and helps support sales.

Jeremy: What changes do you see coming in B2B marketing? How are you preparing Kodak for them?

Jeffrey: B2B marketing will continue to be all about reaching the customer on their terms, in a highly personalized way, by using a wide range of touch points. We have to think about 360, integrated campaigns that provide customers with instant access to information when they want to receive it. No one medium alone can do the trick. Online, social, print and other media need to be in the mix. Some campaigns may use all media together, others will use several components. It depends on who you’re trying to reach and what you want to say. Trade shows, conferences, sporting events and other venues for reaching customers through speaking engagements and sponsors also need to be factored in. Again, it’s all about the 360 approach to marketing.

Jeremy: What does 2010 hold for Kodak from a B2B perspective? What are your top three initiatives? And how are you aligning your marketing to achieve them?

Jeffrey: We’ll focus more than ever on showing customers how Kodak can help them grow their businesses. We need to show customers that we understand their businesses, their challenges, their opportunities better than any other company. We need to show that because of that understanding, we can talk about the right applications and capabilities they need to offer to help their customers be successful. Then, we need to show them we have the right products and technologies to deliver those applications and capabilities. We’ll achieve all of that by continuous, personalized 360 customer communication and engagement.

Jeremy: What is the biggest challenge you are facing in B2B?

Jeffrey: Our number one marketing objective in 2010 is to get closer to customers. Everything we do needs to help make our relationships with customers more meaningful. We’ll do that through relevant, continuous engagement. To do that, we need to get all the moving parts within our organization working together. Because sales, marketing, and operations all engage with customers, we need to make sure those groups are aligned. By working together and sharing information we’ll have the type of customer engagement that will help us win.

Additional resources:

Social Media Tips: Sharing lessons learned to help your business grow, Jeff Hayzlett, Kodak. (PDF) CMO Hayzlett and his team put this ebook together to share some of their thoughts and firsthand experiences using social media for their business. Hayzlett takes the time to use social media like Twitter and Facebook because in today’s media landscape it’s vitally important to be where your customers are. Kodak has always embraced this marketing philosophy, and today that means being active in social media.

How Kodak CMO Jeff Hayzlett Uses Twitter. Here’s a great interview with Kodak’s Jeff Hayzlett in which he discusses his approach to his role as CMO. The company is in the throes of repositioning itself as a B2B, and he successfully leverages Twitter to create attention for the company.

Here’s the story of how panicking just enough may have saved Google’s answer to Facebook and Twitter.

Last week, Google launched an add-on to Gmail called Google Buzz. Almost immediately, the world howled with complaints that the product exposed users’ privacy by publishing lists of followers made up of the people a user e-mailed and chatted with most.

This made Google Buzz a danger zone for reporters, cheating spouses, mental health professionals, and anyone else who didn’t want to tell the world who they e-mailed or chatted with most.

But since this early failing, Google employees — specifically VP of product Bradley Horowitz and Buzz product manager Todd Jackson — have done a rousing job answering criticism from users and the media with rapid-fire updates to the product.

It wasn’t easy.

Horowitz and Jackson’s first move was to set up a  “War Room” for Buzz, where engineers and product managers could plot and push immediate changes to the product. Then, on Friday, the team took questions at a company-wide meeting with Google employees. With that feedback, Jackson pushed Buzz into “Code Red” starting on Saturday so that all updates to Buzz code would push as soon as possible.

With the proverbial alarm bells ringing, Buzz team members decided to stay at Google until the product was fixed. A Google spokesperson said, “Some of them [were here] straight through Friday and Saturday nights and through late Sunday, making changes.” A bunch of Googlers actually slept two nights in a row at the Googleplex.

A week after the complaints, Google corrected all the privacy flaws. Back in 2007, it took Facebook a month to figure its way out of the Beacon privacy mess.

Here’s the Google Buzz timeline:

• February 9 — Google Buzz launches.
• February 10 — In a post titled “WARNING: Google Buzz Has A Major Privacy Flaw,” Silicon Alley Insider complained that before you change any settings in Google Buzz, someone could go into your profile and see the people you e-mail and chat with most. Their complaint was that Google forces users to opt-out, rather than opt-in, to exposing this private information publicly.
• February 11 — Google updates Buzz to make it easier to opt-out of publicly displaying lists of followers.
• February 12 — Silicon Alley Insider suggests this change doesn’t go far enough.
• February 12 — A woman complains that Google automatically set her up to be followed by her abusive ex-husband.
• February 13 — Google goes all the way, replacing an opt-out feature, auto-following, with an opt-in feature, auto-suggesting.
• February 16 — Google promises more changes, including a more prominent “mute” option. Said a Google spokesperson, “Some people feel like there is too much noise in the inbox and this is something we are working on better controls for.”

(via Silicon Alley Insider)
(Photo: star5112)

The recent string of high-profile public relations disasters is impressive. Consider these, to name a few:

• The Tiger Woods sex scandal
• The Toyota safety debacle
• Kevin Smith vs. Southwest Airlines
• NBC’s talk show wars

All of these situations have one thing in common: the brands — be they companies or, in the case of Tiger Woods, a hybrid (personal brand + corporate entity) — failed to get in front of their PR train wrecks and effectively manage the resulting fallout. A late response can get a brand back on track, but damage control becomes an uphill battle.

These entities and their advisers would do well to watch this video from Tom Peters. Peters, co-author of the classic In Search of Excellence and a string of other excellent books, argues that the reaction to the problem often becomes more of a problem than the foul up would have been if dealt with honestly.

Tom’s mantra: Come clean and come clean fast!

The problem is never the problem. The response to the problem invariably becomes the problem. Make those responses positive, quick, and overwhelming.

Toyota… Southwest… Tiger… NBC… Are you listening?

Remember last year’s obsession about kids hating Twitter?

The site saw growth across all demographics in 2009, but growth among people 24 and younger accelerated faster than older folks in 2009, according to comScore.

Unlike most social networks, Twitter started out being more popular with adults before it caught on with younger users. That changed last year as celebrity tweets caught on and mainstream media started talking about the service more.

At the end of 2009, more than 30% of Twitter’s visitors were under 25, this chart suggests, up from about 20% of its visitors at the end of 2008:

(Via Silicon Alley Insider)

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