Digital News Roundup: June 10, 2010

It’s Thursday and we’re bringing you the digital week in review. Catch up on the biggest headlines in our recap below, and follow us on Twitter for insights all week long.

Jobs: Apple Has Inked More than $60MM in iAd Commitments for 2010

At Apple’s Worldwide Developers conference earlier this week, Steve Jobs announced that the company has signed mobile ad campaigns for several large brands, including AT&T, Best Buy and Chanel, among others. TechCrunch also reports that in just eight weeks, Apple has garnered more than $60 million in iAd commitments for 2010 – or half of all mobile advertising spend forecasted for the second half of the year (according to Apple).

: Image via The First Post

The iAd platform will allow users to interact with ads from within an app – without disrupting their primary mode of engagement, whether that be playing a game or watching a video. The platform debuts in less than a month, on July 1.

Google Caffeine: Fully Brewed and ‘50 Percent Fresher’

About ten months after it was announced, Google’s new Caffeine indexing system is now 100 percent live per a post on the official Google Blog. Google says the new system provides “50 percent fresher results for web searches than [its] last index” and represents the largest collection of web content Google has ever offered.

TechCrunch highlights these key stats from Google’s post:

Every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel; if this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second
Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day
You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles

Back in August we took a look at Caffeine and how the new system might impact SEO. If you’re looking to learn more, be sure to read 6 Things to Expect if Google Decaf Gets a Caffeine Boost.

Study: How Consumers Interact with Brands on Social Networks

A report from eMarketer published this week dives into how consumers are meeting marketers across social networks. The key finding: Consumers do want relationships.

For example, on Facebook, research found that a third of all users are fans of brands (that language has since changed to “Like”) within the network (Chadwick Martin Bailey, Feb. 2010). Another study by Edison Research found that more than half of all Twitter users (51%) follow a brand there.

“Those who still think that social network users are too busy engaging with friends to notice marketers must change their viewpoint,” said eMarketer senior analyst Debra Aho Williamson. “Brand interactions are real, valuable and growing.”

Additional takeaways from this report:

The social networking audience in the US has reached critical mass. About 60% of all US Internet users, or 127 million people, will use a social network at least once a month in 2010.
Coupons remain a leading driver of brand interactions in social networks. Learning about sales and new products is also a strong motivator for people to interact with companies in social media. (Read our thoughts on web couponing here.)
Despite the rise in interactions, social networks are not seen as a primary research source when consumers are looking to buy. The report says only 3% of online buyers seek recommendations from friends first – compared to 57% who started their research by going to a search engine.

Real-time Search Reigns in Marketers

Speakers at SMX Seattle this week discussed the growing importance of real-time search and how marketers can use Twitter to promote their brands among consumers increasingly turning to the real-time web to find information. PC World provided a comprehensive recap some of the main points, which included the following:

Searching for brand mentions and responding to them can be effective, but this strategy “misses some greater opportunities,” said Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan. For example, marketers can use Twitter to respond to more generic queries – such as “anyone know pizza” as opposed to the specific brand. In this case, the company might reply to the customer with a special promotion and potentially win a new customer formerly unsure of which brand to choose.
Sullivan also noted that Twitter search offers a unique opportunity for marketers because you can know exactly who’s doing the asking. This is in contrast to Google and other engines that receive queries from anonymous searchers.
Bottom line: Marketers should pay attention to Twitter, says Sullivan. The platform reportedly fields about 18 billion searches a month (though some are automated or done by people monitoring tweets). “My advice remains that you should participate on Twitter and build a reputation, and that should pay off for you as relevancy starts to change down the line,” he said.

For more information on how you can leverage Twitter for your own brand, be sure to check out 360i’s Report on Twitter for Marketers. And, if you’re attending TWTRCON next week, stop by David Berkowitz’s session with Google’s Dylan Casey about “How Real-time is Changing Search.”

Report: Companies Investing More in Web Analytics

This week eConsultancy released its annual Online Measurement & Strategy report and provided the following key findings:

Companies are investing more in people as well as technology in order to get ‘actionable’ information from their web data.
Companies are more likely to understand the need for a coherent online measurement strategy. They are consequently deriving more value from online analytics.
Online measurement and strategy encompasses much more than just traditional web analytics, including a range of business performance tools.
The cost of acquiring a lead is still seen as the most important data requirement.

Marketing Pilgrim notes that the new eConsultancy research saw a 9 percent increase in the number of agencies using reputation/buzz/social media monitoring analytics since 2009, representing the greatest increase across all types of analytics.

Which headlines grabbed your attention this week? Let us know in the comments below, or send us a tweet.