Our latest research, “SocialSenseTV: Network Ratings Report, May 2010,” is complete, just in time for the upfronts season.”Lost” grabs the #1 spot in online engagement, though Nielsen ranks it at #10 in the traditional ratings.

Ad:tech set an attendance record this week in San Francisco: over 11K. And the crowd, which included plenty of big marketers, was decidedly upbeat. They were talking about spending again. Over and over, I heard: “Lousy first quarter, Q2 is looking good.” There was a feeling of having turned a corner.

By now, everyone agrees there’s great value to be drawn from the social-media dataset. But how do we define and categorize that value? PR and marketing activities are generally separated along reactive/proactive and tactical/strategic lines. Analytics is the key to a world of ROI from social-media data.

Reactions to the 2010 Super Bowl ads were reported early and often: The tally of mad, mid-game tweets let us know what the digital mavens were thinking. But what about the rest of the country? The folks who prefer to enjoy their social media on work computers in the days after?

Why is it that social-media listening, widely acknowledged to hold great value for marketers, is still not completely embraced by market researchers? Jack Neff writes compellingly on the subject recently in Advertising Age.

Our weekly roundup of noteworthy happenings in the world of social-media, marketing, and analytics. Nerds use social networking to find big red balloons. Would you like that $40,000 in cash or check? MIT students quickly solved Darpa’s treasure hunt by going viral. See traditional and digital marketing integration at its finest: 5 companies that got it [...]