According to iSuppli Corp global shipments of Internet Enabled TVs (IETV) will reach 27.7 million units in 2010 while only 4.2 million 3-D units will ship this year. iSuppli admits that in coming years 3-D will grow quickly but the hard sell among manufacturers and retailers for now addresses a very limited market of early adopters. But IETV makes sense to more people. 3-D is costly and suffers from very limited content. “IETV provides immediate benefits by allowing TV viewers to access a range of content readily available on the Internet,” says Riddhi Patel, iSuppli Director and Principal Analyst for Television. Read more at www.mediapost.com

Two Screens are Better than One Turns out two media are better than one in moving consumers from awareness to action. In a Nielsen  study of direct-to-consumer drug advertising, exposure on TV and online was more than twice as likely to prompt patients to ask their physician about the drug than Internet alone.

The study also found that premium in-stream video ads which aired as part of a full-length TV episode online generated significantly higher levels of ad recall and brand recognition than other Internet video, display or standard TV ads. Read more at blog.nielsen.com

Analyzing data collected from 533 moms in April 2010, Lucid Marketing and Lisa Finn find 52% of moms use Twitter to keep up with businesses they like or find out about new products. In open-ended responses describing what they like about the businesses they follow, moms say they like tweets with personality and companies that interact with them on Twitter.

See more at www.socialtimes.com

Two Screens are Better than One Turns out two media are better than one in moving consumers from awareness to action. In a Nielsen  study of direct-to-consumer drug advertising, exposure on TV and online was more than twice as likely to prompt patients to ask their physician about the drug than TV alone.

The study also found that premium in-stream video ads which aired as part of a full-length TV episode online generated significantly higher levels of ad recall and brand recognition than other Internet video, display or standard TV ads. Read more at blog.nielsen.com

Social Sharing Adds 30% to Email CTRs

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Email marketing messages with a social sharing option generate 30% higher click through rates than emails without these features. So says a new survey by Get Response - as well as anecdotal evidence that the rules governing email and social media communication are increasingly becoming blurred.

The study, “Email Marketing and Social Media Integration Report” also found that messages with three or more sharing options generated 55% higher CTRs and emails with a Twitter sharing option returned over 40% higher CTRs than messages without any social media links. Read more at www.marketingvox.com

Motorola Droid Rules Android

Motorola’s Droid is the most popular phone among Android users, followed by HTC Hero, while Google’s Nexus One ranks tenth on the list, according to a monthly metrics report from mobile advertising firm AdMob. AdMob has ranked the top ten Android smartphones by market share.

The data is based on 12.7 million Android phones in the AdMob network in May. It’s also why the HTC Evo, released in the first week of June, is missing from the mix.

About 21 percent Android users have the Droid, while 16 percent users own the HTC Hero. Just 2 percent of Android phone users have Google’s Nexus One phone, says AdMob.

Last week, Motorola introduced its eleventh Android phone, the Droid X. It was also a big month for HTC, whose Evo phone is the first and only 4G device available currently.

See more at www.wired.com

Coupon codes can make or a break a sale. More than half of the consumers who used a coupon code during their last online purchase said that if they had not received the discount, they would not have bought the item(s).

When asked how much they spent on their most recent online purchase, consumers who used a coupon spend almost twice as much as consumers who did not use a coupon.

When asked about their overall shopping experience, satisfaction was higher for consumers who used a coupon than for those who did not.

Consumers who used a coupon said they are more likely to buy from the retailer again when compared to those who did not use a coupon.

See more at blog.compete.com

While 78% percent of corporate respondents say their company is using social media, only 41% say they have a strategic plan in place to guide such activity, according to a new study from marketing firm Digital Brand Expressions.

Of those companies that have some semblance of a social media strategy, 94% say that marketing activities are included in the plan; 71% said public relations were factored into the equation; and 55% say that they use social media for sales-related activities. Read more at www.mediapost.com

A full 95% plan to go online, according to new research from rich-media solutions provider Unicast. And what do they plan on doing when they get there?

What are women planning to do this summer? A full 95% plan to go online, according to new research from rich-media solutions provider Unicast. And what do they plan on doing when they get there? Over three in four — 76% — plan to connect with friends and family, Unicast found after polling 516 adult women. Meanwhile, 67% plan to keep up with news; 64% plan to shop for sales/compare prices; 59% intend to entertain themselves (play games, listen to music or watch TV/movies); and 48% will research travel/vacations. Among the ads that women will encounter online, this summer, the most likely to resonate include those related to sale and discount codes. Indeed, a full 46% of women respondents said they would be keeping an eye out for such ads. Just under a third — 31% — said ads that involve creating/submitting an entry to win a prize would get their attention; 24% noted those ads that provide customized local information; and 22% said they’d likely respond well to ads that offer interactive surveys/quizzes. Read more at www.mediapost.com

The Social Media Guide found 9:00AM Pacific Time is the best time to Tweet. “You are hitting three major break times: People arriving at work on the West Coast of America and Canada. It coincides with lunchtime (12:00 pm EST) on the East Coast of America and it coincides with the end of the business day in London (5:00 pm GMT).”

Another handy tip from Social Media Guide - if you want to target a specific person, try Tweet O’Clock to determine when is the best time to tweet that individual.

Guy Kawasaki tells Tweeters not to worry about posting too many times - the best or most important tweets should be sent out at least four times, at intervals of eight to twelve hours.

As for Predictive Marketing, after compiling this list it discussed its own approach to the question. It collected data for a business whose followers consist primarily of event professionals, then decided it wanted to zero in on whether or not a follower had tweeted within a given hour. It found there are actually two optimal hours to tweet: 10:00 - 11:00 ET AM and 12:00 - 1:00 ET PM. Read more at www.marketingvox.com

Twitter referrals to videos on every major category of destination resulted in longer viewing times than any other traffic source. A Twitter referral to a music video averaged a 2:33 viewing time compared to 2:01 of time spent by people coming from Google. Tweets drove viewing sessions of 1:52 on broadcast locations, but traffic coming from Facebook, Bing and Google were all in the 1:37 to 1:38 range. The exception to this rule was Tweets landing on newspaper sites, where Yahoo customers viewed one second longer than Twitter refers.Read more at www.mediapost.com

Twitter users are more likely than members of other social networks to interact with brands and are less averse to advertising, according to a report from Edison Research.

According to the report, 51 percent of Twitter users said they follow at least one brand on a social network. That number drops to just 16 percent for users of all social networks. Forty two percent of Twitter users said they use it to learn about products or services, and 41 percent said they use it to provide opinions about them. Twenty eight percent use Twitter to look for sales or discounts, 21 percent use it to purchase products or services, and 19 percent use it to seek customer support.

But what may really grab the attention of marketers on Twitter - and Twitter itself - is what the report found about attitudes toward advertising. Fifty percent said that their use of Twitter would be unaffected if the service began incorporating targeted advertising. (Fifteen percent said they would stop using Twitter all together, but 16 percent said they would use it more.) Read more at www.clickz.com

For the first time, the internet has surpassed TV as the “most essential” medium, according to the latest Infinite Dial study by Arbitron and Edison Research.

When asked which they would choose if they must, never again watching television or never again accessing the internet, slightly more people chose TV as the medium they would eliminate. Forty-nine percent of respondents chose to eliminate TV, compared to just more than 48% who said they would get rid of the internet.

When first asked the question in 2001, 72% of respondents said they would do without the internet, while only 26% said they would eliminate television. In the demographic of persons younger than the age of 45, the gap between the two forms of media is more profound, with more people choosing to live without TV. Read more at www.marketingcharts.com

Today comScore released its February market share data for the US.   Smartphone penetration is now 19%, with 45 million total smartphones now active in the US.  Google’s share jumped to 9%; however, RIM continues to lead with 42% market share.

See more at metrics.admob.com

Twitter says it’s currently seeing about 50 million tweets per day, which breaks down to about 600 per second.

But how do those numbers compare to Facebook, the king of social networking, and Google Buzz, the new kid on the block?

Facebook status updates: 700 per second Twitter tweets: 600 per second Buzz posts: 55 per second

Google: 34,000 searches per second Yahoo: 3,200 searches per second Bing: 927 searches per second Read more at searchengineland.com

According to OneSources’ recent B2B SalesPulse Report, which surveyed 136 B2B sales professionals, respondents rated outbound prospecting 3.7 out of a high of 5. It’s no surprise that outbound prospecting delivers qualified leads, as it is a highly focused strategy that allows sales professionals to focus exclusively on the types of communities and sales titles that are in their “sweet spot.”

Mike Schultz, Publisher of RainToday.com, confirms such sales calls (also referred to as cold calls) work very well when properly executed. “I’ve seen cold calling work as a major part of a lead generation approach, yielding six clients in six months (a major acceleration of client additions), and increasing the pipeline by fivefold, for Deep Customer Connections, a management consulting firm in the insurance industry,” Schultz writes in his article, Cold Calling Works: You Just Do it Wrong. Read more at www.hubspot.com

See more at blog.compete.com

The recession has had its effect on consumer behavior online, and the watchword is frugality. Whether or not shoppers go back to their spendthrift ways, for now coupons are cool and deal-seeking is the norm.

Higher open rates for coupon offers translated into higher click rates as well, though the difference was much smaller. E-mails with coupons that could be used online were most likely to be clicked, at 4%.

See more at www.emarketer.com

Mind-Blowing Web Stat #1: 40,000-fold increase in the number of websites in 15 short years. If the number of approximately 5000 websites in 1994 is correct and that we are now part of some 200 million plus websites today, then we’ve experienced a stunning 40,000-fold increase in number of websites. How’s that for a growth rate? It also helps explain why Kevin Ham, a Canadian Internet entrepreneur, is minting money from the domain names he owns. Mr. Ham owns some 100,000 domain names worth hundreds of millions and that generate estimated ad revenue of $70 million annually. Great foresight, on Ham’s part, to see that good domain names are like scarce waterfront property. This is the chart copied from Netcraft:

Total Sites Across All Domains August 1995 — October 2009

See more at blogs.harvardbusiness.org