The top reason for following or liking a brand, company or celebrity on social networking sites is to receive discounts and special offers, according to a recent survey of global online consumers conducted by Nielsen.

If the Internet has truly “arrived” and is being taken seriously, why have we not yet seen significant brand advertising dollars follow?

Megabranding can be an effective strategy for marketers to drive growth and efficiency from power brands across related product categories under the right conditions. Executing the strategy successfully involves careful understanding of the brand’s specific equity and leveraging it for competitive advantage with robust marketing support.

Interview by Sue MacDonald, Research Manager, Online Division
In a difficult economy of rising unemployment, struggling newspapers and advertising agency cutbacks, Alexa Robinson graduated this year from the University of North Carolina/Chapel Hill with a degree in… journalism and advertising. But she wound up finding a position that carried an entirely new job title — one that didn’t even exist when she started at UNC — “Twintern.”
As Pizza Hut’s first-ever Twitter intern (Twitter + intern, hence, “Twintern”), the 22-year-old Greensboro NC native has been on the job in Dallas since late …

In today’s tough economic times, advertisers are under increased pressure to gain market share while working with shrinking budgets. Should they cut back on media investments? How will they succeed?

Todd Hale, SVP, Shopper and Consumer Insight, The Nielsen Company
2008 was a stellar year for store brands in the U.S., with both dollar and unit growth outpacing branded offerings across consumer packaged goods (CPG) categories. Store brand dollar sales within food, drug and mass merchandisers grew 10.2% for the year, while branded dollar sales grew by just 2.6%. Although the gap in unit sales was not as wide, indicative of how store brand dollar growth resulted from inflationary pricing across a number of commodity-based categories, store brand units grew 2.6% …

A recent video made by two rogue and rude Domino’s employees left a bad taste in the mouth of customers who watched it. But, thanks to some social media tipsters, Domino’s was able to issue their own YouTube response quickly as a remedy to the potentially brand damaging viral video. The buzz online about the brand spiked during the crisis.

Patrick Doyle, President, Domino’s U.S.A., thanked the online community for the tip in his video and the brand also created a twitter account @dpzinfo to communicate.

The column below, by John Burbank, CEO, Nielsen Online, was recently published in Adweek.
Want a firsthand lesson in the health of the Internet? Ask a friend a simple question: “What’s your favorite online ad?”
Chances are they’ll have a tough time giving an answer. Some may mention a dancing girl seducing you to refinance a mortgage; others may bring up one of the online executions of the Mac vs. PC television campaign.
But many people cannot recall any online advertising, despite all the time each of us spends on the Web and …