Regulatory

Asked where the most significant gaps are in talent on the client-side with respect to digital marketing, 80% of agencies and production companies pointed to user experience (UX) as a major (45%) or minor (35%) talent gap, per results from a Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) survey conducted by Econsultancy. Many also reported that clients have skill gaps in analytics (79%), social (78%), and technology (76%). Read more »

Social collaboration tools are already an important consideration for organizations worldwide, and will rise in importance over the next 1-3 years, according to a joint survey of nearly 3,500 business executives, managers, and analysts conducted by the MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte. The study, released in May 2012, reveals that the majority of respondents already consider social software to be either important (18%) or somewhat important (34%) to their organization. In 1 year, though, three-quarters perceive social business will be at least somewhat important, and in 3 years, 86% envision some importance for the software. Read more »

Some countries are making progress towards adoption of mobile payments, but on the whole, there is still a ways to go before the world reaches mobile payment readiness, finds MasterCard WorldWide in a May 2012 study that combined public and proprietary data with original market research. The study examined the preparedness and receptivity of 34 countries for person-to-person (P2P), mobile e-commerce (m-commerce) and mobile payments at the point of sale (POS), finding that on a scale of 0-100, the average score across all countries was 33.2. In fact, no country reached the inflection point of 60 on the adoption curve, with Singapore garnering the highest readiness score of 45.6, ahead of Canada (42) and the US (41.5). Read more »

Just 17% of companies say they have already achieved a single view of their customers, while a further 1 in 10 do not know the status of their company's efforts to do so, according to survey results released in February 2012 by DataFlux. Even so, this may change in the near future: 31% say they are in the process of implementing a system for a single view of their customers, and another 17% say they are planning for the implementation of a system over the next 12-18 months. Read more »

Internet access tops the list of functions smartphone users could not live without, cited by 20.8% of respondents to a Prosper Mobile Insights survey [download page] released in February 2012. In fact, smartphone users said that internet access was more indispensable than calling (19.9%) and texting (18.2%). After those three leading functions, there was a large dropoff to the next most indispensable functions, email (8.2%), GPS/maps (5.5%), Facebook (3.1%), and apps (general - 2.7%). Read more »

By 2015, the dollar volume of goods sold through social media should rise sixfold, to $30 billion from $5 billion in 2011, according to [pdf] a Booz & Company estimate released in January 2012, which limited its estimate to hard goods such as electronics, apparel, and movie tickets. The company forecasts the market to almost double this year to $9 billion, of which the US will account for $3 billion, up from $1 billion in 2011. Indeed, while Booz & Company expects rest of the world revenues to increase by 400% between 2011 and 2015, its projections are even more aggressive for the US market, forecast to grow from $1 billion last year to $14 billion in 2015. Read more »

Cybercrime has been pervasive in the past year, hitting 431 million web users worldwide in the past year, according to [pdf] a September 2011 study from Norton by Symantec and StrategyOne. Data from the "Norton Cybercrime Report 2011" indicates cybercrime-related losses in the past year totaled $388 billion USD. Read more »

Texas residents are the most likely in the US to lack health coverage, with 27.2% reporting being uninsured in the first half of 2011, according to Gallup-Healthways-Well-Being-Index data released in September 2011. Nearby Mississippi follows, with 24.5% of residents uninsured. Read more »

The top online retailers sent each of their subscribers 3.2 promotional emails on average during the week ending Aug. 26, 2011, according to the Retail Email Index from the Retail Email Blog. That's up 6% week-over-week, up 5% from where it was four weeks ago, and up 21% year-over-year. Read more »

While the majority of consumers around the world (83%) say that it is important that companies implement programs to improve the environment, only 22% say they will pay more for an eco-friendly product, according to The Nielsen Company's 2011 Global Online Environment & Sustainability Survey of more than 25,000 internet respondents in 51 countries. In addition, about three in four (76%) global consumers say raw materials influence their decisions on where to shop and what to buy. Read more »