Jon Bond, CEO of Big Fuel, just cited some dramatic data from Edelman showing that 18% of consumers believe paid advertising, versus 78% for WOM.

Warren just threw out an example of how marketers might employ Adobe analytics: "regressional trends around social media conversations, and how they impact search activity."  As a math-phobe I am running for the hills.

Chad Warren of Adobe Omniture just made the very sensible point that engagement measures for social media are, at best, proxies for ROI (including the big one, revenue) -- and are "often misleading" when it comes to showing social's actual impact.

"You can measure a lot more than you probably think," in the world of social media, according to Warren, which is probably true... but could also induce hyperventilation in marketers who are already swimming in a sea of data.  Of course, as mentioned in previous posts, Adobe also has some tools to make sense of the data.

Adobe has also produced a Facebook best practices guide -- in collaboration with Facebook -- to cut through the clutter, according to Warren. Adobe has also created a social analytics tool that addresses ROI -- "how are social conversations impacting our bottom line," with real-time marketing intelligence to "connect social media to business results."

Chad Warren of Adobe Omniture is showing the audience a very comprehensive dashboard for social media advertising showing marketing performance, marketing strategy, share of voice, and influence.  Also showing how it has been applied by clients like Virgin America to track and optimize everything they do in Facebook -- with granularity showing changes in social engagement over time (as in, dayparts and even smaller time segments).

That's the prediction from Justin Kistner, who also believes that paid social advertising will dominate in the future -- simply because most marketers aren't very good ("suck") at publishing good content in a timely fashion.  That's interesting -- but it also seems like an admission of failure by marketers, given the earlier conventional wisdom that "real" content was the only way to engage consumers in social media, because anything smacking of corporate messaging would strike them as "fake," "inauthentic," etc.

Apparently marketers make lots of (frequently entertaining) mistakes on Facebook, given that it's the topic of a presentation and also a roundtable discussion here at the Social Media Insider Summit.  I think there's a certain cathartic value in talking about it... also, it is funny (to me).

that's over 150 million people. Worldwide Facebook is approaching 800 million.  Holy moly!

ads targeted to Facebook fans have a click-through rate of .35%, compared to .05% for ads targeted to non-fans, according to Justin Kistner at the Social Media Insider Summit.  Those numbers speak for themselves (and it also makes perfect sense).