From digital dads to social media mavens, children redefine how parents and kids communicate using traditional and new media. Just ask the eight-year-olds using cell phones—and not for phone calls alone!

The Nielsen Company today reported September 2009 data for the Top Parent Companies/Divisions and Top Web Brands, as well as average Internet usage.

Year-over-year, unique viewers, total streams, streams per viewer and time per viewer were up, led by 25 percent growths in total streams and time per viewer.

Social media has not only changed the way consumers communicate and gather on the Web, but also impacted content discovery and navigation.

If social media and social networks are these all-powerful game changers, shouldn’t they eventually make a newsworthy impact on email, the internet’s original “killer app?”

If you’re in the U.S. and are using a social network like Facebook, Myspace or LinkedIn, chances are you’re more affluent and more urban than the average American.

Americans have nearly tripled the amount of time they spend at social networking and blog sites such as Facebook and MySpace from a year ago.

The Nielsen Company and Facebook today announced a multi-year strategic alliance to help marketers better use the Internet to develop and market new products. The first product of the collaboration, Nielsen BrandLift, is designed to give marketers a tool for…

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 …

There has been increasing mainstream interest in and gravitation towards all things vampire, most recently spurred by the Twilight books/movies and the HBO series, True Blood. And even if these aren’t familiar topics to you yet, marketers are keen to the vampire mystique.
Vampire-related sites are drawing audiences on the Web. In June 2009, the official Twilight movie site was the top online vampire-related destination, garnering 553,000 unique visitors who spent an average of two minutes and 45 seconds on the site during the month (the New Moon trailer is a …