Time flies, and some things get stuck in piles awaiting the “opportune moment” for adequate study, which never comes.

From the pile:

• Social Mobile User Engagement. Vitrue.Undated but near the bottom of the pile. — Use image and short text posts for best engagement. And lay off the exclamation points!
• State of the Media: Consumer Usage Report. 2011. Nielsen — What we do with our devices, from satellite TV to mobile Web. Lots and lots of numbers.
• Digital Marketing Performance Report: Global Q3 2011. EfficientFrontier and Context Optional. — Tweeted this one about Facebook ad CPCs rising 54% between Q2 and Q3, but even more about digital marketing.
• State of the Media: The Social Media Report. Q3 2011. Nielsen. — Half-page of key findings, but this one bends the imagination: “Internet users over the age of 55 are driving the growth of social networking through the Mobile Internet.” Who woulda thunk it?
• Digital Omnivores: How Tablets, Smartphones and Connected Devices are Changing U.S. Digital Media Consumption Habits. October 2011. comScore. — Title pretty much says it all.

The Center for Marketing Research at UMass/Dartmouth presents convincing evidence in a new study today that Fortune 500 companies have peaked (for now) in their use of blogs, Facebook and Twitter — an effective definition of social media today.

They conclude:

“These results may signal a leveling off and possibly retrenchment when it comes to the adoption of social media among the 2011 F500. There is also evidence of change in the adoption of these tools by industry and a clear sign from some companies that these are not part of their communications strategy. Given that the F500 are the titans of American business, we may be seeing the slowdown in business adoption of social media. At the very least, this group appears to have slowed or stopped its adoption of the three most prominent tools—Blogging, Facebook and Twitter.”

For the last 8 years, analyst Mary Meeker has identified the top trends affecting and flowing from the new digital technology.

But her thoughts rely on data, and that alone makes her stand out in the chattering crowd.

Here are her 11 trends for 2011, pulled directly from slide 3 of her presentation. (My notes in parentheses.)

1. Globality – We Aren’t In Kansas Anymore… (Take a look at where traffic is coming from.)
2. Mobile – Early Innings Growth, Still… (Lots of room for smartphone growth)
3. User Interface – Text  Graphical  Touch / Sound / Move (Think iPad, Siri)
4. Commerce – Fast / Easy / Fun / Savings = More Important Than Ever… (Cheaper elsewhere)
5. Advertising – Lookin’ Good…
6. Content Creation – Changed Forever
7. Technology / Mobile Leadership – Americans Should Be Proud (Windows installation < 50% on Net-enabled devices since 2Q2010)
8. Mega-Trend of 21st Century = Empowerment of People via Connected Mobile Devices (Think Japanese quake & Twitter)
9. Authentic Identity – The Good / Bad / Ugly. But Mostly Good? (‘Only time will tell how all this plays out…’)
10. Economy – Lots of Uncertainty
11. USA Inc. – Pay Attention! (Spending AND revenue are problems)

Find the full presentation on Scribd.

Amazing.

Yesterday we looked at the World Wide Web through the 1996 lens of OnlineUniversity.net.

Today, watch what happens with social media between 2005 and the present in an infographic from Search Engine Journal.

Was it just six years ago that only 16% of 18-29-year-olds, the most avid users of social media, were networking online? (Now that number has hit 86%.)

See Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr and Wikipedia grow up before your eyes.

An astounding array of social stats. The full size infographic can be found here.

If you are under 30, never mind.

The rest of you, remember GeoCities? … It was 1996, the first full year I wrote about the Internet.

Flash back. AOL.com was the most popular Web site, followed by WebCrawler.com and Netscape.com.

OnlineUniversity.Net reviewed the average American Web user then and now.

Here is a slimmed down version of the infographic. You can find the humongous wide screen version here.

28% of American adults with cell phones use them to get directions or recommendations based on their current location. (This works out to be 23% of all U.S. adults.) So says Pew.

As someone who often finds himself in the wrong block in Old Town Alexandria, I can relate. I imagine you can, too.

Other findings:

• A much smaller number (5% of cell owners, equaling 4% of all adults) use their phones to check in to locations using geosocial services such as Foursquare or Gowalla. Smartphone owners are especially likely to use these services on their phones.
• 9% of internet users set up social media services such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn so that their location is automatically included in their posts on those services. That works out to 7% of all adults.

Find the report at Pew’s Internet and American Life Project.

65% of adults who are online use social media. That translates into a smidge over half of all adults (online or not).

That’s up from 5% of all adults who used social media just 6 years ago, or a tenfold increase.

Pew is our source for this.

About all the data you need are in these two graphics:

The earth moved yesterday along the East Coast … and released a flood of new data about the tubes and pipes medium.

• Facebook now ranks as the third largest video site, after only Google/YouTube and VEVO, according to comScore.

• Facebook and Twitter both broke traffic records in July, again according to comScore but reported by TechCrunch.
• Facebook chalked up 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) pageviews in July, according to Mashable reporting on Hitwise statistics.
• WordPress now powers 14.7% of the top 1 million Web sites and 22 out of 100 new active sites, according to its State of the Word report.
• And yet … 31% of younger, more mobile social media users claim they are getting bored with it all. That’s from Gartner.
• Yep, Global Web Index claims that a number of Facebook activities actually declined from June to July, according to Mashable.

  That ought to give you something to gnaw on. Let me know when you get it all figured out.

From Pew comes word that 92% of online adults use search engines to find stuff on the Web and the same percentage use email.

Says Pew:

Perhaps the most significant change over that time is that both activities have become more habitual. Today, roughly six in ten online adults engage in each of these activities on a typical day (emphasis added); in 2002, 49% of online adults used email each day, while just 29% used a search engine daily.

One-third of Americans own smartphones, and one-fourth rely on a smartphone to access the Web.

The future is now.

New study today from the Pew Internet Project:

• 83% of American adults have a cell phone.
• 42% of those phones are smartphones.
• Therefore 35% of adults in the U.S. own smartphones.

From the press release:

Some 87% of smartphone owners access the internet or email on their handheld, including two-thirds (68%) who do so on a typical day. When asked what device they normally use to access the internet, 25% of smartphone owners say that they mostly go online using their phone, rather than with a computer.

The study page, including a PDF download of the entire report, can be found here.

And while we’re on the topic, why is cell phone two words but smartphone is one word?