It's not a well known fact, but there are indeed men who shop with phones. . . and laptops. . . and tablets. Hidden before now, eMarketer has shined the light on them and I'm here to say, be not afraid. We, the shopping women of America, welcome you. The tip comes from a survey by Men's Health magazine, which kind of tells you a little about the respondents right there.

Facebook has just released their proposed changes to their privacy policy and it's got the masses upset. )Surprise!(. First and foremost, they've changed the name of the document from Privacy Policy to Data Use Policy and that should tell you all you need to know. Let me pause a moment to reiterate my feelings on internet privacy. I see it as an oxymoron. If you put content in a public space, I don't care if you mark it private and lock it up six ways to Sunday,

I have a friend who gets all of her news from Facebook. If it comes up there, she's got it, if not, forget it. Sometimes it seems like everyone in the US is this way, but new numbers from the Pew Research Center say it isn't so. The numbers come from their recently released State of the News Media 2012 report. This extensive report looks at all the ways we consume news, from TV to print to digital. Inside the report is a section devoted to Facebook and Twitter.

Thomas Edison said that genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. I can't help you with the second part, but I can help you with the first. Every Friday, I'll present to you a variety of new online, mobile, and social media marketing campaigns. It's my hope that you'll be inspired by the works of others because face it, even though inspiration is only 1%, it can be much harder to come by than the other 99.

Let me repeat that headline. In 2012, 1 out of every 5 people in the world will logon to a social network at least once a month. Incredible, isn't it? eMarketer says those 1.43 billion social network users represent an increase of 19.2% over last year. Think that's something? By 2014, they say it will be 1 in 4. And for the people who believe that Facebook is part of an alien plot to take over the world, here's a look at their success stories. The good old U.S.

Surprise! People are paying attention to your video ad. A new study, slated to appear in next month's Journal of Marketing Research shows that serving up a surprise is the best way to get a video viewer's attention. Now, a scary guy jumping out of the darkness will work just as well as an unexpected bunny wearing a space suit, but getting someone's attention is only half the battle. In order to keep their attention,

It was a good year for mobile marketing, maybe the first where marketers of every size felt comfortable taking a run at it. Millennial Media, the SMART report folks, have put together their year in review and it's chock full of information about where we've been. It begins with a true vertical explosion. Triple-digit growth in mobile ad spend. Not surprisingly, technology is leading the way as the biggest spender in the mobile market.

They say you only have one chance to make a good first impression and this is certainly true for social media. Call it a profile, a brand page or homepage, that single spot on the web has to tell the world what you're all about in a glance. Big companies like Coca-Cola and Warner Brothers have teams of people who do nothing but handle company branding. They make sure that every graphic,

The good news is, total advertising expenditures rose in 2011. The bad news is that the rise was only 0.8% and the internet didn't make out all that well. The numbers come from Kantar Media's final 2011 report and it could be worse, right? Looking at the Internet section, you can see that Q4 was a tough sell. Display still did okay for the year but paid search is down 2.8% over last year.

Content is what makes Google run. Every result it returns is linked to a piece of content somewhere else on the web, be it an article, photo, video or website. Over the years, Google has increased the detail in their results so you get a better idea of what's behind the curtain before you click. All results have a couple of lines of text under them drawn from the start of the article or keywords from the site. Some even show you a preview of the site before you click.

Apps may be all the rage, but a new study from Nielsen shows that it's mobile websites that are getting all the attention from shoppers. This past holiday season, Nielsen monitored the smartphone shopping habits of 5,000 volunteers. They concentrated on five big sellers " Amazon, Best Buy, eBay, Target and Walmart " and found that, combined, they reached nearly 60 percent of those shoppers. In spite of all the hoopla around holiday shopping apps,

Foursquare has always been the leader in the location check-in app battle. For a little while, though, Gowalla was looking like some real competition. Then Facebook bought Gowalla and on March 10, 2012, they shut them down. Yes. Gowalla has gone-walla. This would seem like good news for Foursquare but it might just be a sign of the times. A sign that location-based check-ins aren't on trend anymore. Earlier this month,

Branded content has become increasingly popular with brand marketers as they search for new ways to engage an ad-weary audience. Top on the list? Video. According to new numbers by Outbrain, 87% of the brand marketers and ad agencies they surveyed create branded videos to spread the good word. Blog posts are still going strong, which pleases the writer in me. Articles have likely dropped off due to the infamous Panda Update of 2011 . Which is fine,

If you're on the web daily, you've heard of Pinterest. You've probably heard about the crazy numbers they're pulling in and the incredible growth. Here's a visual from an infographic published by Performancing: Wow, it's ike Mount Everest climbing up into the clouds. Pretty amazing. But just because people visit the site, doesn't mean it's good for marketers. So we move on to referral traffic, this one from Shareaholic : Look at Pinterest and Twitter.

73% of people in a recent Pew Internet & American Life Project survey said they would not be okay with a search engine tracking their moves and using them to deliver better results in the future. Bet that number didn't surprise you at all, did it? You also won't be surprised to know that they thought tracking was an invasion of privacy. 65% even went so far as to say that search result collection is a bad thing . A very bad thing.

You know those Facebook ads that say how many of your friends like the product )or is it the ad they liked. . . (? Turns out, they work. Nielsen dissected the results from 79 Facebook campaigns and the graphic shows you what they found. People who saw social ads had 55% greater recall than those who saw regular display ads. And suddenly I feel like I'm in a fifties toothpaste commercial " 55% fewer cavities with Crest! Joking aside, that's a nice lift,

First there was e-commerce, then Facebook or FB-commerce and now AdAge is predicting Tweet Commerce in the near future. It truly is a wondrous world we live in. As of this past December, Twitter's biggest advertisers were able to customize their Twitter profile page, turning it into a brand page, thusly. Pretty, but other than the ability to pin posts to the top and change the decor, it's not that far away from everyone else's profile page.

The new iPad and the Marketer. Sounds like the name of a modern fairytale but don't expect a Cinderella story. The new iPad is faster, sharper and slightly more functional than its older sibling, but it's not a huge breakthrough for marketers. What it is, is proof that tablets are going mainstream and can't be ignored in your marketing plan. The new iPad )they're not calling it the iPad 3 for some reason( has a screen resolution that is unprecedented.

Print isn't dead. . . yet, but we can start writing the obituary. Cosmopolitan Magazine says they just hit 100,000 paid, digital subscribers and they did it at a higher price point than the print subscription. )Why digital and ebooks often cost more than the print version, I'll never understand.( Cosmo, the smart but still sexy magazine for women, also has more than 3 million print subscribers. In 2010, the VP of publishing said that the magazine sells " 430,

"Untangling the Social Web" is a multi-part whitepaper from Integer that attempts to quantify the relationship between social media and business. They just released " Part 3, Social Networking Personas: A Look at Consumer and Shopper Mind-Sets " and it's loaded with information that can help you sharpen your social media efforts. The basis of the report is that social media users can be dived into four types: The Bonder, The Sharer, The Professional and The Creator.