Some interesting direct mail stats from Deliver magazine.

More than 12 billion catalogs were mailed in 2010.

55.6% of respondents found catalogs “useful” and 21.5% found catalogs “interesting.”

52.4% of consumers read direct mail from merchants. More than 53% found merchant mail “useful” and 16.8% responded to merchant mail offers.

We’ve been waiting for this to come along, Google’s answer to Facebook’s Like button but for search results pages. You will now start to see a tiny +1 icon next to the title of orgainic and paid (AdWords) search listings. Currently, it appears next to the Favorite star but this is expected to go away soon. The idea of this nifty little gadget is make search more social, allowing users to effectively vote up (recommend) their “favorite” listings. Okay, let’s see how long it takes the search scammers to spoof this one.

When Cisco decided to introduce its new Aggregated Services Router (ASR) exclusively online to reach their target audience (network engineers), the news itself attracted a great deal of media attention. But when the official campaign numbers came out, there were plenty of latte spit-takes from all, even the “gurus” of social media-dom. Here are just some of the highlights:

• 9,000 people attended the social media product launch event (90 times more attendees than in the past)
• Nearly three times as many press articles than traditional outreach methods
• More than 1,000 blog posts and 40 million online impressions
• One-sixth the cost of a traditional launch (shaving over $100,000 off its launch expenses)

Cisco’s use of social media and gaming channels for its product launch is a shining example of online marketing done right. No newbie to social media, Cisco was not shy leveraging its 22 blogs, 300+ YouTube channels, 100,000+ Facebook fans, or 2 million Twitter followers. Cisco developed content specific to the launch, including a social media widget, a 3D game, and a virtual concert in Second Life featuring eight rock bands.

I was going to aggregate all the details of this case study here but then found Casey Hibbard’s superb post on Social Media Examiner. No point reinventing the wheel so here is the full monty on Cisco’s B2B Social Media Case Study. Enjoy!

The next great passion of Chris Anderson

Chris Anderson of TED Conferences aggregated advertising research from a number of authorities (e.g. Forrester, Nielsen, Yankee Group) and discovered the market value of one hour of attention is worth $1 in print, $0.25 on TV, and less than $0.10 on the Internet, suggesting that the industry has yet to figure out how to best capitalize on the nearly 2 billion people online (carrying over the interruptive ad model is not the way to).

To help figure it out, TED is inviting the business community to submit videos to the Ads Worth Spreading Challenge by February 7, 2011. Up to 10 winning ads/videos will premiere at TED2011 in Long Beach, CA, February 28-March 4, 2011, before 1,500+ thought leaders as well as subsequently appear on TED.com for free for one week in March. Winners will also appear on the YouTube homepage and as ads across YouTube content.

Appearing as post-roll after every  TEDTalks videos for a week, the company claims, is about 2 million impressions (views). That’s a pretty sweet deal! Learn more on how to enter here.

We all know that mobile marketing is the “next big thing” and regardless of your opinion on the best way to leverage it, you can’t ignore 6.5 trillion messages. Take stock as you enjoy this stat-rich video from Sybase (SAP).