Talk about your significant expansion: online advertising—targeting anything and everything involving social media—is expected to grow 14% next year to $51.9 billion. Email advertising will increase by 9% to $16 billion, advertising in video streams will increase by 60% to $5.6 billion, and online promotions will increase by 10% to $24 billion.

“Going green”: a concept that is spreading like wildfire (in the best sense of the phrase, of course). As people are becoming increasingly aware of the state of our environment, many are eager to pitch in and do what they can.

Thanks to our project manager and our creative director, that now includes our office here at Interactivity Marketing. No, we’re not all driving hybrid cars or using solar power, but we are making one tiny—yet important—change: recycling. Water and soda bottles, plastic cups (including fast food products), plastic silverware, paper, and boxes/cardboard are all placed into a separate container and sent over to a local recycling center. It might not seem like much to some, but hey—it all contributes to the big picture.

Here are some other ways that you can “go green”:

• Cut down your energy costs: set that thermostat a few degrees lower in the winter and a few degrees higher in the summer. Save yourself a few bucks by bundling up with a blanket in January and using those ceiling fans in August.
• The same concept applies to your clothes: use cold water whenever possible (as 85 percent of the energy used to machine-wash clothes goes to heating the water) and use a drying rack instead of your dryer.
• There are three major reasons to walk or bike instead of drive: exercise (which everyone could use more of!), gas costs (use that $30 per week toward groceries or bills), and less air pollution. If you have to drive, carpool. If you have the time to walk, do.
• Buy locally raised, humane, and organic meat, eggs and dairy whenever you get the chance. In addition to the health benefits, purchasing from local farmers keeps money in the local economy. Your body and your wallet will thank you.
• Avoid bottled water. I repeat: avoid bottled water! Purchase a re-usable water bottle (preferably aluminum rather than plastic) and fill it up with tap water whenever you need it. Your teeth will get the fluoride they need and you’ll avoid contributing to the large amounts of container waste from bottle water.
• Instead of tossing your old cell phone or computer, recycle it. E-waste contains mercury and other toxics, and is a growing environmental problem.
• Make your own non-toxic cleaning products; it’s simple to do! Baking soda, vinegar, lemon and soap will do the trick and you will save yourself money.

It should come as no surprise that companies are using blogs. A lot. In fact, blogs fill a specific niche that other forms of social media do not. It is estimated that this year just over one in three companies have a public-facing blog used for marketing (which is expected to rise to 43% by 2012). Studies have come to show that marketers perceive blogs to have the highest value in driving site traffic, brand awareness, lead generation and sales.

Statuses, updates, posts: while they may let you know what a friend is doing, they don’t have the ability to inform exactly where they are. Just when you thought Facebook couldn’t put you in even closer contact with your friends, they went ahead and introduced the Places feature: mobile GPS technology that announces an exact location upon clicking “check in”.

Similar to services such as Foursquare and Gowalla, Places is available immediately through Facebook’s iPhone app and other advanced mobile devices. Users looking to announce their location simply tap “check in” and are able to view a list of nearby places; they then choose the place that matches where they are. They have the ability to write down what they are doing at that location (as well as what they think about it) and a story appears on friends’ new feeds as well as Recent Activity section on the page for that place.

Facebook’s overall goal with this feature is to not only inform friends of where they are, but to also learn if their friends are nearby at the same time. By writing down details of the place, others are able to view where the writer was days or even years ago. In addition to a single user checking in, the “tag” feature is available for linking others to that location as well (people can tag friends only if the taggers themselves check in to the location too).

The con side to this exciting new feature, however, is safety concerns; how is it safe to inform everyone on your friends list of your location? Facebook’s solution: check-ins will appear only to users’ Facebook friends as a default, and users have the ability to trim the recipients list to specific friends only.

And so there you have it: the innovative world of Facebook expanding yet again.

Let’s face it: we all like to succeed. And our social media is no exception; while it can be easily measured with various indicators such as voice, reach, retweets and comments, measuring without an overall objective won’t bring you any closer to success. You need to be able to gauge its success, measure it, and see that it remains healthy.

To get the most out of your social media measurements, follow these seven steps:

1) You need a goal. Know why you are engaging in social media in the first place to help you dictate not only what you do, but how you measure what you do.
• If your goal is to drive awareness, you will be looking at metrics like share of voice, reach, readership and engagement with content (measured in action vs. views)
• If your goal is to create better products and conduct market research, you will need to focus on top market trends and satisfaction with various competitive products

2) Your departments need to be on the same page. Necessary departments need to work as units toward a common goal to ensure success; this means communicating and sharing the right metrics with the right people on demand (for example, creating a dashboard that’s easily visible by every department).

3) Context must be considered. Always make sure to look at metrics over time and inside of a competitive landscape (if you know your share of social media conversation is 35, what does that mean compared to your competitors’ shares or their change over time?).

4) Choose the correct platform. Consider aspects such as data (determine which channels you are going to measure?), reports (identify how you want to share and present information), budget (figure out whether you have a budget or can only afford free tools), and ease of use (consider productivity-boosting alerts and workflow modules, automation and advanced analytics).

5) Audit social media. Note where you and your competitors are today and use this as a baseline against which you will measure at least once per month.

6) Research your channels. To get the most out of your social media analysis, you must dig deeper: evaluate performance by channel, for yourself and for your competitors, to find which selections are performing well and to help give your numbers specific context.

7) A/B testing. If you have several campaigns out there and are curious about what content is getting the best response, social media measurement can help you to conduct the right analysis to figure out what’s working and what isn’t. You can measure the public’s opinion of things you try.

Social network usage, which has rapidly increased in popularity, will rise sharply in 2010. 127 million people (roughly 57% of all domestic internet users) will visit social network sites on a monthly basis in the United States by the end of the year. A 16% increase since 2009, it is projected that by 2014, 65.8% of Americans will regularly visit these sites.

Vitrue, a social media management company, has announced the newest addition to their enhanced Virtue SRM (social relationship management): Vitrue Publisher 2.0.

Perhaps one of the most intriguing features of Vitrue Publisher 2.0—in addition to managing multiple Facebook pages—is the support for Facebook’s Open Graph API. As the new ‘Like’ button is driving a considerable amount of traffic to publishers’ sites and click-through rates are three to five times higher, Facebook has announced that publishers are now able to do even more with it: publish to connected users directly from the Open Graph API. Simply put, if a user ‘likes’ a particular product or company, that company can send the user news on discounts or updates to that product in their News Feed. In addition, when an update is pushed out to a publisher, certain groups are now able to be selected instead of just one mass News Feed.

While comment moderation may have been a problem in the past, it is now much easier: certain phrases, URLS or hashtags can be flagged, and any comment that contains profanity, certain words or URL patterns (associated with spam) can be automatically deleted.

Social management space is really beginning to take off. The more brands invest in Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks, the more tools are required to maintain proficient functioning.

Facebook and Twitter: everyone’s favorite guilty pleasure. The brand new iPad: an immediate favorite among Apple lovers. Combine the three and the result is an enhanced, mobile means of checking statuses and posting Tweets. As just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, it does. Flipboard, a start-up that will be releasing its iPad app on Wednesday, will declutter everything visually.

Typically, when visiting these two social networking sites, there is a long list of status updates (with thumbnail photos on Facebook and shortened links on Twitter) that aren’t particularly easy to navigate through. Twitter is the bigger of the two problems, with its founders discussing the need to make it more accessible and easier to navigate. Flipboard now makes all of this much easier.

The app builds a personalized magazine full of updates, photos and articles shared by a reader’s friends or friends that they choose to follow on Twitter and Facebook. Status updates are arranged to look like pull quotes with prominent photo displays. Rather than linking to an article, users are able to read the first few paragraphs and are able to comment (and if wanting to read more on links or user’s pages, it is easy to connect to that webpage). Data selections are made by a start up called Ellerdale that will analyze and filter real-time data streams.

In an effort to create more effective ads on web pages, Flipboard will feature advertisements that are reminiscent of print. Rather than viewing small advertisements (in which companies are competing for space), iPad users will see less intrusive full-page ones. The company plans to make money by offering content in exchange for payments or subscriptions and sharing revenue with the publisher.

Let’s face it: we’re an impatient generation of consumers. We want things fast and efficiently, and avoid driving, sales haggling, and in-store purchases in general. When you think about it, why would we want to spend the time and gas money? Considering technology has made it possible to browse and buy electronics, jewelry, and basically any good known to man—even groceries!—online, why would clothes be any different?

J.C. Penney, one of the United States’ largest retailers, is adding a twist to their pre-existing online gallery: reality show-and-tell through video. Six teenage girls were chosen by the company to participate in these videos—recently named “hauls”—in which they show off their new purchases and give consumers an extensive view of the clothes. A significant step up from simply viewing them on a mannequin, this will provide back-to-school and back-to-college students (who are expected to spend $50 billion on goods) with expanded shopping options. In addition to showing off their new clothes, the girls openly state their opinions (which proves to be equally as helpful).

More than 100,000 hauls have been created and posted on YouTube for the public, and J.C. Penney has decided to jump in on the action. The six participating girls were each given gift cads ranging from $250.00-$1,000.00 and were provided with free transportation and lodging to shop near J.C. Penney’s home in Planto, Texas. As per Federal Trade Commission guidelines, haulers are required to disclose any video in which they were given free products or compensation, allowing major companies to turn consumer-generated content into credible corporate material. J.C. Penney will be launching their hauls this coming week at jcp.com/teen.

Other retailers have also chosen to take advantage of the marketing that hauls can provide. American Eagle uses both Twitter and Facebook to post messages encouraging their customers to check out theirs on Youtube (or even post hauls of their own) and Forever 21 is in the process of solidifying two of the internet’s most popular haulers, Blair and Elle Fowler.

Talk about convenience: the fact that one little online video is able to persuade a number of consumers into purchasing a specific brand serves as a key marketing tool. Hauls are definitely on the rise.