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.”

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.”

Nice grab by Vallegwag illustrating how our sensitivity training—and our automatic sensitivity filters—can make for some amusing untended bleeping. In this case, Digg.com’s automatic naughty word filter thought homo erectus sounded as dirty as it, well, really sounds.

If you didn’t pay much attention in science class, homo is the same unfortunately humorous prefix as the one in homo sapien, which refers to you and me—hey! Don’t swing at me, brudda. Blame the Greeks. Homo erectus is considered the earliest the human species.

Even funnier is that when Digg edited out the word homo in this instance, it made the headline dirtier and funnier than before:

Erectus Crosses the Open Ocean.

Oddly, that reminds me of my teaching days in Japan. Find a group of native Japanese speakers and get them to tell you the story of the attempted assassination of the President of Taiwan.

It was Election Day. They had to apply pressure to stop the bleeding.

A couple of transposed r’s and l’s and you’ve got hilarity for the rest of the day.

The threat of a DNS cache poisoning issue found by security researcher Dan Kaminsky scared the virtual pants off the technology industry, who responded well to the situation.

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Heck, I’m ready for any kind of football, even if it means having to hear about Brett Favre every single day for the rest of the summer.

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Facebook still has strength among the post-college aged crowd, but those in school may think Facebook isn’t cool any longer.

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Once the province of Ask Maps before IAC gutted the project, Google Maps picked up the walking directions banner and made that feature available on its service.

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