Here’s a link to social network traffic reports by Nielsen Wire, courtesy of Jeremiah Owyang.  These are all still growing like the emerging markets they are (fast, in other words), with MySpace still king of the hill.  But MySpace is too big to grow fast (“mature” doesn’t seem right for it, somehow, but that’s the analogy to the stage of economic development for you).  Twitter is the growth leader, followed by tagged.com, Ning, and LinkedIn. Interesting tidbit on the network profiles:  Facebook, LinkedIn, and Reunion.com are most popular among visitors ages 25-34, 35-49, and 55-64, respectively.

Interesting look at online retail sales reports from Rimm-Kaufman Group, which manages about $100 million in pay per click volume every year.  Their clients have seen a 20% decline in sales volume from about six months ago, and the volume is not yet ramping up for the holidays as it normally would.  However, the absolute number of orders due to PPC is NOT declining.  Therefore, as you would expect, the decline is due to smaller average size of order. There’s still people online; they are still buying.  Just not as much. Good news for sellers of smaller priced items.

So far the hoped-for boost from holiday sales has not yet materialized.  Bargains are in the air – stay tuned!

Hitwise reports that online retail sales declined for the 8th week in a row.  Bright spots remain: house and garden, grocery and alcohol.  But if you are selling computers or music online, time to look even harder for good marketing outlets as well as cost savings.  This is not happening in a vacuum.  A NYTimes article reports a 0.3% decline overall in consumer spending, which is exceedingly rare. Reality bites–get serious about your marketing!

With all the buzz surrounding social media and mobile, this research from Exact Target is important. The nugget in the results is this:  even among teens, email is the preferred channel for marketing messages. The respondents tend to see social media and SMS as PERSONAL communication channels, and marketing in them is a turn off.  The research also indicates that the prime time for email marketing is morning, when people are dealing with the stuff in the inbox, and they give messages more time.  Later in the day, emails get only seconds of attention, if any.

A couple weeks ago Google launched a new Beta service called Insights (similar to its Trends, if you’ve used that).  I think you would have fun playing around with this for a few minutes (or hours:  it’s a little addictive) to learn something about your favorite search terms.  You’ll see trends over time and by region for those terms, and you can filter the results by category.  Note:  the category filters change the results a lot!  And, you can use some of your standard search tricks to manage the analysis, like adding a negative term to limit the output (san luis obispo -county).  Enjoy and profit!

The Pew Internet & American Life Project released a summary of its latest round of research on Internet usage on August 6.  The quotable tidbits:  almost half of adults (18 or over) use search at least once a day, while just 13% use a social network once a day.  The takeaway:  despite the explosive growth of social networks and the continuing popularity of email (remember that ‘killer app’?), search is increasingly the portal to the Internet. You have to get search right for your website before you do anything else, which should come as no surprise.