Social media marketing may be all the rage in the world of marketing, but the bean counters are not impressed. This is the latest assessment from Razorfish in its annual report on the state of social media. We outline here a few ways to take advantage of this lag in the market and make social media a more cost-effective outreach component.

Talkin’ about my generation: recent university grads and other newcomers to the workforce would consider work hour flexibility and Internet access liberty more important than a fat pay check, a new study shows. The question is: will jobs recruiters re-write employment contracts to reflect this new trend?

So says a new report out this morning by the IAB UK, which calculates Britons spend more time on blogs and social networks each day than they do checking email, texting mates, playing games or surfing for porn, combined.

And, by the same measure, could McDonald’s Facebook fan page only be worth $260,000, or about 1/100th the value of Starbuck’s? That’s the lopsided assessment of Atlanta-based Vitrue, a social media marketing agency that has developed a whizzy calculator that spits out a value for a brand’s social media presence.

New insights into the utilization of social media by Fortune 100 companies reveals Twitter is still the hottest platform, but only US and Asian companies embrace the full scope of social media brand marketing, a new study compiled by Flowtown shows.

A recent comScore report suggests that brand loyalty declines in an economic recession. Obvious. Right? Well, looking at some interesting social media loyalty metrics, these findings might not be telling the whole story.

Polls open tomorrow for the UK general election but Facebook already has a beat on the winner after polling an impressive 463,000 eligible British voters on the popular social network this past weekend.
And the winner is…

Twitter is optimizing the way we search for tweets and, more importantly for its future, giving companies fresh opportunities to advertise within a Twitter conversation stream.

Are you friends with your mom on Facebook yet? We sure are. But is it cool? Not really.

Edison Research came out with their yearly report on Internet and multimedia usage in the US. The big news is the massive increase in Twitter-awareness, but tweeting participation remains low.