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If you’re thinking a blog is too much work for your marketing efforts, check this out…. More than 8 of 10 business journalists (84%) say they have used or would use blogs as primary or secondary sources for articles.

This from the 2007 Arketi Web Watch Survey: Inside B-to-B Media Usage of Web 2.0

• One-quarter (25%) said blogs make their job easier
• 18% said instant messaging makes their job easier.
• 97% said they enjoy using new technologies
• 30% said they use some type of instant messenger for professional communication.
• 60% of journalists said they spend more than 20 hours a week on the internet.

Hat tip to Lee Oden for the Twitter.

How’d you like to see just about every smart Internet marketing blogger that exists in one great list? Well, just fire up the over 300 blogs on the Search Marketing Blogs list at TopRank Marketing and you’ll give your RSS reader a real workout. I’ve found a mixed bag of content, but overall, pretty damn good. There’s an OPML and text version so you can load them into your reader. I may post my faves from this list sometime, but for now, I’m still sampling the whisky.  I’ve narrowed it to active, interesting bloggers without regard to their “stature” (A-list, etc.) and am going to let it sit a while before I pass too many judgements.

Last June, I ribbed Lexmark about their slogan, “We’re Always Working.” Now they’ve decided to see if it is really the case, and if productivity has climbed over the last 5 years. So, they asked Ipsos to interview 711 knowledge workers between Oct. 10 and 24, 2006 as a part of a survey of knowledge workers. People who work from home some of the time are more likely to claim strong increases in productivity. What’s not clear is if those hours are in addition to the normal 40 office hours, or part of them. Some hilights:

• 66% say they are somewhat more productive than 5 years ago.
• 37% say they are much more productive.
• 6% say they are less productive (AOL users? Bloggers? LOL!)
• 83% believe access to technology makes them more productive, especially among the “constantly connected,” buzz, buzz, ring, ring crowd.
• 75% of those who work at home at least an hour a week say they’re more productive because of it.
• 55% spend at least one hour per week working from home.
• 34% spend at least five hours per week working from home.
• 11% spend more than half of their work week at home.
• 3% were very, very much less productive. I think they were bloggers.

Of course, Lexmark this study to bolster demand and awareness of the market for their All-in-one printers. We have one of the new ones and it’s pretty nice. So perhaps the survey didn’t show that people are always working - just doing it in different ways thanks to connectivity.

The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s Center for Marketing Research conducted a phone survey with 121 of Inc. Magazine’s “Inc. 500” to see if there have been changes in the awareness and use of Social Media techniques (social networking, blogging, message boards, online video, wikis, and podcasting.) It doesn’t say which of the 121 were surveyed.

While previous findings that showed minimal participation, many found a suprisingly energetic adoption in this report

• 42% were very familiar with social networking
• 38% were very familar with message boards
• 36% were very familar with blogging
• 31% were very familiar with online video
• 30% were very familiar with podcasting
• and… amazingly to me, 16% were familiar with Wikis.

When asked how important social media was to this group:

• 26% said Very Important
• 40% said Somewhat Important
• 19% said Somewhat Unimportant
• 13% said Very Unimportant
• 2% didn’t respond

And finally, which social meddia methods do these companies use?

• 33% message boards
• 27% Social Networking
• 24% Online Video
• 19% Blogging
• 17% Wikis
• 11% Podcasting

The research results presented here are statistically valid at +/- 3%.

Conclusions? Well, clearly these companies tend to be entrepreneurial and nimble firms. They are out on the edge a bit - but if you look at the Inc 500, you’ll see a huge mix of companies, a good sign for those of us who believe in the power of Social Media to change the face of marketing.

I can remember seeing “powers of 10″ as a kid on PBS. It started at the atomic level and ended up at the intergalactic scales. I even have one of the original books. This shockwave tool instantly caught my eye. While this works with a pre-set grouping of photos, I would LOVE to see it work with Flickr, or be available as a development tool for use in creating a new generation of ecommerce catalogs. It would need a few mods (grin.)

[click on image to see tool]

It would need to have a palette building algorithm. Colors 0-255 would need to be created from flickr images. If you have enough images you could even tag your images for it. Once you have a tagged set of images, you’d be able to map them to the palette so they could appear in the right RGB configuration. The palette map would need to be cached.  A tool like pic2color is a good first step.

Imagine posting products or brands in this kind of display. Logos of companies could be displayed as well as coupons. Actions or gestures of different types could produce different results such as buy a product, etc.

The photographs could be the catalog. There are endless ways to use layers of photographs to build an emotional branding experience with this.

I would say absolutely NOT. I’ve never, ever seen a good one.

Recent MEC tests show founder video on a subscription product actually can hurt conversions! They found that the person sometimes couldn’t see or hear the video for technical reasons, and that this would hurt the chances of conversion. Now, we didn’t see what he/she looked like, but let’s assume for a moment they were average looking.

But if they did manage to complete the video, conversion did manage to rise as the visitor continues the process.

My take away: For video use on landing page, make sure you use a rock-solid video transmission mechanism such as Flash and test the bejeezus out of it. Use good web-video production techniques (e.g. no panning if it’s not needed.) with awareness of compression and make sure the video covers only what video is best at covering.

Every time I’ve entered this conversatoin with a client, there is an instant “twilight zone” switch that gets thrown.. So I carry around links to the “At the Whiteboard” section over at ZDNet. This is the best use of human involved web video I’ve seen for any purpose. It gets right to the point and does a great job.

What I would love to see is this style of video combined with a service offering in a A/B test to see if it improves conversion.