Is there a connection between social media exposure and search behavior? A new study by GroupM Search and comScore titled, “The Influenced: Social Media, Search and the Interplay of Consideration and Consumption,” focuses on answering that question.

The study found searchers who engage with social media, especially those exposed to a brand’s influenced social media, are far more likely to search for lower-funnel terms compared to people who do not engage with social media. In addition, people exposed to a brand’s influenced social media and paid search programs are 2.8x more likely to search for that brand’s product compared to users who only saw paid search.

There was a 50 percent click-through rate (CTR) increase in paid search when people were exposed to influenced social media and paid search. This indicated people exposed to social media are more likely to click on a brand’s paid search ad compared to those exposed to the brand’s paid search alone.

Among searchers using a brand’s product name in the query, the CTR increased from 4.5 percent to 11.8 percent when users were exposed to both influenced social media and paid search around a brand.

In organic search, consumers searching on brand product terms who have been exposed to a brand’s social marketing campaign are 2.4x more likely to click on organic links leading to the advertiser’s site than the average user seeing a brand’s paid search ad alone.

“Social media-exposed consumers are far more likely to search for brand and product-related terms, and click on a brand’s paid search ad,” said Graham Mudd, vice president of comScore, Inc.

“This finding provides strong evidence that investing in social media marketing can both increase initial brand consideration and drive higher conversion rates once the consumer has decided to purchase.”

Warner Music Group and YouTube are close to completing an agreement that would allow the video sharing site to play videos from a number of artists on the Warner label.

Advertising Age is reporting that sources familiar with the situation are very close to have finalized the deal.

The discussions are being led by Google’s VP of content partnerships, David Eun, and Warner’s digital chief, Michael Nash.

Warner is reportedly in talks with Vevo, the “Hulu for music” partnership between YouTube, Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment.

It’s likely that Warner would do a non-exclusive deal with Vevo as part of its strategy for broader distribution of its ad-supported music videos.

Vevo has the potential to be the exclusive distributor of Universal Music and Sony, which is about 60 percent of the U.S. music market. Warner accounts for around 20 percent of the U.S. music market.

Vevo has a partnership with YouTube but it will be using its own video player when it launches sometime in December. The player will allow users to download lyrics, make a playlist or sync music to user-generated content.

Any agreement with Warner would only help YouTube and Vevo to achieve relatively fast growth much like Hulu has done since its launch.

When it comes to privacy and trust the companies that rank highest in the U.S. include eBay, Verizon and the U.S. Postal Service, according to the Ponemon Institute and Truste.

eBay ranked highest as the “Most Trusted Company for Privacy” because of its ability to protect consumer privacy while managing large amounts of sensitive data. Verizon ranked as the second most trusted company, while the U.S. Postal Service, WebMD, and IBM rounded out the top five.

Verizon and the U.S. Postal service became the first telecommunications and government organizations, respectively, to make it into the top three. Facebook made its first ever appearance in the top 10, signifying its commitment to implementing privacy practices that are approved by both their user community and privacy experts.

“Year in and year out our Most Trusted Companies for Privacy study is a fascinating snapshot of public sentiment toward business, and the overall drop of financial services organizations in 2009 continues that trend,” said Dr. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder, Ponemon Institute.

“With the banking industry at the center of a national financial crisis, it’s no surprise to see a loss of trust reflected in the rankings of even those top performers on this list. Meanwhile, the continued strong showing of e-businesses such as eBay, WebMD, Yahoo!, and Facebook seems to demonstrate consumers’ growing comfort with doing business online.”

Facebook has announced plans to improve user’s control over their information and allow them to make better choices about their privacy.

The new improvements will include new notifications, additions to Facebook’s Privacy Policy, and technical changes aimed at giving people more transparency and control over the information they provide to third-party applications.

The changes came about after Facebook worked with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, which spent a year reviewing the social networks privacy polices. The Commissioner made a number of recommendations, which Facebook plans to implement over the next year.

“Our productive and constructive dialogue with the Commissioner’s office has given us an opportunity to improve our policies and practices in a way that will provide even greater transparency and control for Facebook users,” said Elliot Schrage, Vice-President of Global Communications and Public Policy at Facebook.

“We believe that these changes are not only great for our users and address all of the Commissioners’ outstanding concerns, but they also set a new standard for the industry.”

Specific changes Facebook will be making:

· Updating the Privacy Policy to better describe a number of practices, including the reasons for the collection of date of birth, account memorialization for deceased users, the distinction between account deactivation and deletion, and how its advertising programs work.

· Encouraging users to review their privacy settings to make sure the defaults and selections reflect the user’s preferences.

· Increasing the understanding and control a user has over the information accessed by third-party applications. Specifically, Facebook will introduce a new permissions model that will require applications to specify the categories of information they wish to access and obtain express consent from the user before any data is shared. In addition, the user will also have to specifically approve any access to their friends’ information, which would still be subject to the friend’s privacy and application settings.

Yahoo is trying something a little different this year to promote its popular fantasy football season.

The company that says it has never been a search engine is holding the Yahoo Sports Mayoral Face-off competition, which will pit 11 mayors against each other in fantasy football.

The fantasy season starts on September 10 and ends on December 28. The mayor who does the best in fantasy footballs takes home $15,000 for the local non-profit sports program of their choice. A second prize of $15,000 will be given to the city that receives the most votes from fantasy fans.

Mayors who are competing in the competition include:

Byron Brown (Buffalo, NY)
– Buddy Dyer (Orlando, FL)
– Jim Schmitt (Green Bay, WI)
– Luke R. Ravenstahl (Pittsburgh, PA)
– Ron Dellums (Oakland, CA)
– Kevin Johnson (Sacramento, CA)
– Mark Funkhouser (Kansas City, MO)
– Gavin Newsom (San Francisco, CA)
– R.T. Rybak (Minneapolis, MN)
– Pam Iorio (Tampa Bay, FL)
–Mick Cornett (Oklahoma City, OK)

During the season fans can check out the mayors’ starting line-ups and team roster changers here.

Starting on Thursday, August 13 fans can also help their favorite city win $15,000 by voting here. The winning city with the most passionate fantasy football fans will be announced on September 11, 2009. The winner of the Yahoo Sports Fantasy Football Mayoral Face-off will be announced on January 11, 2010.

Hewlett-Packard has launched a contest on YouTube called the “HP You on You project” that asks people to create and share videos expressing who they are without showing their faces.

The contest runs through August 30 and is open to people globally. Contestants can submit their videos on the contest website. Each week a panel will select 20 videos as semifinalists. YouTube users can vote to choose the top four videos, which will then compete to win the grand prize of $40,000 along with recognition of the video on the YouTube homepage.

After six weeks, each of the 100 semifinalists selected by YouTube will receive an HP Artist Edition notebook PC, and the 20 finalists selected by YouTube viewers also will each receive $2,500. The first-, second- and third-place winners will receive $40,000, $20,000 and $15,000 prizes, respectively.

“We are really excited about the global scope, accessibility and social aspects of the HP You on You project,” said Jamie Byrne, head of Marketing Programs, YouTube.

“This is one of the first programs where we have integrated tools for users to share their videos as broadly as possible across the web and other social platforms.”

The U.S. government announced today it would soon release $4 billion in loans and grants to help bring broadband service to rural communities across America.

This is the first round of Recovery Act funding aimed at expanding broadband access to help bridge the technological gap and create jobs building out Internet infrastructure.

“Today’s announcement is a first step toward realizing President Obama’s vision of a nationwide 21st-century communications infrastructure - one that encourages economic growth, enhances America’s global competitiveness and helps address many of America’s most pressing challenges,” said Vice President Biden.

The Recovery Act provided a total of $7.2 billion to the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS) to speed broadband deployment in areas of the country that have been without the high-speed infrastructure.

Of that funding, NTIA will use $4.7 billion to deploy broadband infrastructure in un-served and underserved areas in the United States, expand public computer center capacity and encourage sustainable adoption of broadband service. RUS will invest $2.5 billion to facilitate broadband deployment in rural communities.

NTIA and RUS will be accepting applications for loans, grants and loan/grant combinations to be given by each agency under a single application form. The complete details are available here.

Online retail sales in the U.S. (excluding travel) will reach nearly $132 billion in 2009, down 0.4 percent from 2008, according to a new forecast from eMarketer.

The forecast says that if the recession ends this year, as many economists expect, online sales will begin to rebound in 2010 and hit double digit growth by 2011.

“Everyone focuses on the downturn in the overall economy, but the recession has only accentuated the gradual decline in online sales growth over the past few years-the decline would likely have occurred even in normal economic times,” says Jeffrey Grau, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, Retail E-Commerce Forecast: Cautious Optimism.

“It’s just simple math: The bigger online sales become, the harder it is to maintain high levels of growth.”

Increased spending by existing online buyers is the key to continued ecommerce growth. About 152 million individuals ages 14 and above will shop online in 2009.

“That means almost nine out of 10 Internet users will browse, research or compare products online this year,” says Mr. Grau. “This rate will grow slightly by 2013, since most Internet users predisposed to online shopping will already be doing it.”

Forrester Research estimated that store sales influenced by online research are higher than retail ecommerce sales. For 2009, projected cross-channel sales are $758.8 billion, while online sales will reach $235.4 billion.

In April, Ohio State University rode the publicity wave provided by news outlets everywhere reporting the school’s finding that Facebook users had lower grades than non-Facebook users. A new study contradicts the first and the authors declare the opposite correlation while ripping on the first author’s methods.

An academic catfight ensued, and those are guaranteed as interesting as a solid round of knitting.

Un-academically,  here’s the thesis and conclusion together:

Facebook can’t give you bad grades. It can’t give you good grades, either. Video games, shopping malls, bars and clubs, keggers, iPods, the Internet, YouTube, Hulu, television telephones, texting, church, sports, sex, boyfriends, girlfriends, and porn can’t give you bad grades either, just like cookies can’t make you fat but eating cookies can, just like books can’t make you smart but reading them can.

Professors and teachers can give you bad grades but more often people give themselves bad grades because they spent too much time on Facebook/MySpace/YouTube/WOW, at the shopping mall/parties/boyfriend’s place, on and on and on.

People choose their behaviors, their addictions, their obsessions, not the other way around, and students choose whether to study or screw around on Facebook. End of story, no need for research. Something else we don’t really need a study to know: Social students don’t do as well in school as non-social students.

Personally, I did well in school despite blowing off studies to go to movies or whatever, but my engineering major roommate who hardly left the dorm room except to go to class, did even better. Go figure, huh?

Mega-thanks to BusinessPundit for naming Twellow one of 10 essential Twitter tools for business. We’re mighty proud of our creation and encourage our readers to give Twellow a go.

You can find Twitter users in any city, doing any profession, talking about just about any topic. You can search profiles or categories, or even see who’s tweeting in your “twellowhood.”

A kind of yellow pages for Twtter, we agree Twellow is an indispensable tool for business-minded people looking to expand their networks.