(c) Can Stock PhotoEvery week, new studies are released, new tools are introduced and news reports flood the Web. Even the most useful items can sneak by unnoticed. I collect interesting tidbits that cross my radar and each Friday select a handful for the Friday Wrap, a summary of stories about which communicators ought to be aware. If you’re interested in the pool of content from which I choose the items for the Wrap, you can find them at LinksFromShel.tumblr.com

IR managers take note: Social media is a new source of investment information

While investors continue to rely on traditional sources of investment information—press releases, for example, and analyst reports—six in 10 financial professionals under 40 years old surveyed by Marketwired said “they regularly use information from social media sources,” according to Sarah Sherman in a PRWeek story. “Marketwired found that the under-40s surveyed are three times more likely than other groups (41-to-65 and 65-plus) to say the information they get from social media is credible.” As companies consider new SEC rules on using social networks for material disclosure, they may want to factor the preference of the new generation of investment professionals into their thinking.

Third-party tool makes it easier to retract a bad tweet

Journalists and businesses have struggled to find ways to take it back when they send an incorrect or misguided tweet. Twitter itself hasn’t provided a solution, but a software developer has taken a shot with a tool called Retweet Retract, Retwact for short. Brian Fung, writing for The Atlantic, explains how it works: “Once you’ve given it permission to look at your account, the app culls your five most recent tweets that have garnered retweets. Click on one of them, and a little green radio button fills in. Down below, you can tap out a hand-written apology or send the correction as-is. When you publish the notice, it goes from your account to all your followers. Meanwhile, Retwact’s own Twitter account (@Retwact) reaches out with an @-mention to the first 100 people who retweeted your (incorrect) tweet. The link…takes you to a side-by-side comparison showing both the older, incorrect tweet as well as the newer, corrected one.” Twitter shut down the Retwact account for a terms of service violation—sending similar messages to too many people—but it appears to be back up and running as of this morning.

Social sharing drives video success

Last Friday, I was the emcee for a Viral Video Summit that featured a panel of experts who agreed that the total number of views wasn’t the most important metric in assessing the virality of a video. The share-to-view ratio, the said, is far more important. That observation is supported by a study from Unruly Media, a video technology company, which determined that for successful videos, “10% of total shares occurred on the second day after debut, the apparent high point for video ad sharing. And the first three days saw one-quarter of total shares,” according to emarketer. “Social networkers are ready and willing to share video; they are simply waiting for content worthy of their attention and endorsement.”

Value of a brand’s Facebook friend has risen 28% in three years

The rush by brands to rack up large numbers of Facebook friends for their pages has subsided, according to some research, in favor of higher levels of engagement with the friends they already have. A new study could revive that clamor for new friends, though. According to Syncapse, a social intelligence firm, every like a brand page gets is worth $174.17, 28% more than the value in 2010. Syncapse arrived at the number by studying 2,000-plus users who had liked a brand, factoring in product spending, loyalty, the likelihood that they’d recommend the brand, brand affinity, and media acquisition cost. “Facebook fans spend more money not only on the brands they fan ($116 more per year than nonfans), but also within the brand’s sector—43% more, despite not having a higher income than non-fans,” according to Ned Smith writing for Business News Daily. “Those fans are also 18% more satisfied with their brands than nonfriends, and 11% more likely to continue using the brand than nonfriends.”

Has Lowe’s cracked the Vine code?

Marketers are enamored of Vine, Twitter’s six-second-video-sharing service and some have embraced it in their marketing but to limited effect. Lowe’s, however, may have found a way to use the videos as part of a coordinated marketing effort, introducing 12 home improvement tips that take advantage of Vine’s brevity to demonstrate “how to remove a stripped screw, get rust off of knives and use pillowcases to organize sheets,” writes AdAge‘s Natalie Zmuda. Lowe’s chief marketing officer, Tom Lamb, says consumer adoption of short-form channels like Twitter and Vine “is forcing us to…learn to be incredibly concise.” Lowe’s worked with photographer and Vine user Meagan Cignoli to produce the videos.

Want to buy a Twitter ad? Now you can

For several years, Twitter advertising was available only to those businesses invited to use it. No more. Twitter has opened its advertising platform to anyone, writes John Constine for TechCrunch. He quotes Kevin Weil, Twitter’s senior direct of Product for Revenue, saying that “We’re really excited that today every business in the US is going to be able to leverage the power of Twitter advertising, either through Promoted Accounts to build a loyal follower-base, or through Promoted Tweets to reach a broader audience.” Anybody can visit a self-serve interface to buy Twitter ads, selecting the location, the interests of the desired audience and the daily budget. Twitter’s business analytics come with the service.

Favored journalists get exclusives via Twitter

Number 10 Downing Street is using Twitter to deliver exclusives to favored journalists before the stories are released officially by government ministers, according to a Guardian piece by Josh Halliday. Says one senior official, “The reality is that (Twitter is) an extraordinarily useful way of getting talking points out there.” The British government is also using Twitter to shut down rumors before they spread too far. For examlple, when a reporter got a story wrong, the prime minister’s communications director “ordered a pre-emptive tweet from the Tory press office account” to ensure the reporter followed up on his promise to tweet an apology for the error. You have to wonder how long it will be before companies give favored reporters breaking tweets ahead of the competition in order to generate buzz for their announcements.

Add Yahoo to the list of native advertising venues

Yahoo is now accepting native advertising, content created by organizations that pay for it but that looks and feels like it’s part of the site’s content flow. The company relaunched its home page in February, switching to an ongoing stream of content based on each reader’s interests, so the insertion of native ads was a no-brainer. The “NewFront” presentation to advertisers and agencies on Monday was used to roll out the new format, according to AdAge‘s Michael Learmonth, who quotes Yahoo VP of Product, Mike Kerns, noting that “The targeting (of the native ads) will be primarily based on your user profile,” whether or not the user is logged into their user account. “We have improved that algorithm substantially.”