That’s the latest prediction from eMarketer which is factoring in an impressive 20.2% growth for the bellweather US online ad market for 2011, and more gains in the near future. This year, online ad revenue is expected to reach $31.3 billion on its way to almost $50 billion in 2015.

People often ask, ‘what is employee engagement?’ Most of us know how engagement feels because most days something is likely to ‘engage’ us, either at home or work. When we are engaged, we become focused on whatever subject or task is involving us. We are excited, enthusiastic, energized and more creative. At best we have that fully alive feeling when we lose track of time – what Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow”.

Venture capitalists are back, funding privately-held firms in the United States alone to a tune of $5.9 billion in first quarter of 2011.
That’s the highest Q1 rate of investment in start-ups in the past three …

I’ve been exploring some of the implications of openness at large scale and identifying how value is created. One way to think about that is by positioning openness and empowerment against control and ownership.

Any good social business is built on two carefully balanced pyramids, which mirror two different approaches that are required to coexist in a business that wants to thrive in a world where its customers are highly connected.

The first pyramid is the business as it’s usually intended. It is built top-down, where decisions and strategies are decided at the top level and propagated downward toward a single carefully crafted communication channel, which might even span or multiple media, but still fundamentally “broadcast” in nature.

Storytelling is a phrase that always brings a lot of head-nodding from marketers. It’s all about the story, right?

So why do we continue to build stories for the web age in the monolithic way that still apes an age where we needed one or two big stories a year, the marquee creative, the 30-second spot, that would be rolled out for the mass audience. These “stories” ignore the human side, the social side.

Our SEO expert Andrew Shotland recently went on a patent dive, scouring the fine print of a dense patent application looking for insights into how Google ranks your site’s URL in Google Maps. The answer: incoming links are key, but not just any old links.

In this age, a few positive words about a product or company can make or break a sales outlook. Consumers are making social networks and digital forums their first research reference point before making a purchase. It’s no wonder then that the so-called social commerce sector is booming, expected to top $30 billion by 2015. And yet many companies are unprepared for what could be the single biggest change in retail in a generation.

We share 27 million pieces of content every day, a new study says, and that number is increasing everyday. But what types of content are consumers more likely to share? It’s a question top-of-mind for big brands and organizations investing in social media outreach. Here’s a hint.

The social media business story of 2011 is, of course, the infusion of VC cash into the social start-up sector. It’s a story that impacts the whole social space, top-to-bottom, as investors are funding today’s cloud/mobile/social innovations that will become the essential consumer tools of tomorrow.