Frost & Sullivan’s ‘2009 Corporate Use of Social Networking’ research indicates that only about 40 percent of U.S. organizations formally use social networking or web 2.0 tools.

Frost & Sullivan’s survey of 1,439 businesspeople found that 80 percent personally use web 2.0 technologies to connect and share with friends and family while at work, while 54 percent use them for professional purposes such as connecting with colleagues, generating leads, and collaborating on projects.

YouTube has just made tons of Internet marketers very happy. It’s new ‘Call-To-Action Overlay” will allow you to place an overlay on your videos that includes a clickable link people can use to visit your website.

To date, YouTube has shied away from allowing videos to include clickable URLs, presumably because this would send traffic away from YouTube.

Nielsen Online CEO John Burbank reckons web publishers would better serve both themselves and brand advertisers by reducing the amount of inventory they give to ad networks.

Speaking at the Advertising Research Foundation’s Audience Measurement 4.0 conference last week, Burbank also said excessive inventory was diluting ad prices which in turn hurt online publishers.

Global research sponsored by Alcatel-Lucent indicates that broadband Internet services are almost recession-proof. 84 percent of consumers identified broadband as an ‘essential’ network service and least likely to be cut during financially difficult times.

Furthermore, the research found that consumers throughout the world are planning to subscribe to and/or upgrade their broadband services, even while reducing spending in other areas.

Which are the most popular search marketing tactics used by marketers… and do they generate the highest quantity or quality leads? Well, according to research by MarketingSherpa, 95 percent of the 1,147 marketers it surveyed used paid search engine marketing, while 71 percent used search engine optimization (SEO), with the majority using both forms of search marketing.

Of the 95 percent of marketers using paid search marketing on Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Ask.com and vertical search engines, 15 percent said paid search generated high quantity and high quality leads, while 35 percent said it generated high quantity but low quality leads, 16 percent said it generated low quantity, high quality and 35 percent said paid search generated low quantity, low quality leads. (Percentages don’t add up to 100 percent due to rounding).

Nielsen reports that consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies increased their investment in online display advertising by 57 percent during the last two years.

CPG firms reportedly spent $156.2 million on online display advertising (e.g. banners and other image-based ads) in the first quarter of 2009, significantly more than the $99.8 million they spent in the first quarter of 2007.

Two U.S. House subcommittees recently met to discuss privacy issues around online advertising and behavioral targeting.

The two subcommittees - the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, and the House Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection Subcommittee - met in a joint hearing to discuss whether federal legislation or self-regulation should govern online privacy.

In more evidence of the ‘long tail’ applying to iPhone applications, just as it does elsewhere, the May 2009 AdMob Mobile Metrics Report reveals that most of the 2,309 applications (54 percent) in AdMob’s network have less than 1,000 active users.

In other findings, AdMob found that:

• 5 percent of applications had more than 100,000 active users, representing 116 applications in AdMob’s iPhone network.
• 14 percent of applications had between 10,000 - 100,000 active users.
• Five days after its launch, the iPhone 3.0 Operating System (OS) represented 44 percent of iPhone ad requests.

For more information about AdMob’s research check out the May 2009 Admob Mobile Metrics Report.

The United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is preparing new guidelines about the kinds of disclosures bloggers and website owners should make when they endorse a product on their sites.

No question, the guidelines clearly apply to affiliate marketers who, if they have not done so before, may now have to let visitors or readers know when they are clicking on affiliate links.

Based on comScore data, Blogger - started in August 1999 by Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone and sold to Google in February 2003 - is still the most popular hosted blogging platform.

In May 2009, Blogger attracted 52 million unique visitors from the U.S., compared with Wordpress.com with 28 million uniques, and Six Apart’s properties including Typepad.com with 14 million.