(c) Can Stock PhotoThe Friday Wrap this week is rich with research results, case studies, and reports. As always, there was more content to choose from than space allowed. You can skim the complete list of stories and posts I tagged at my link blog, LinksFromShel.tumblr.com.

CEOs of world’s biggest companies have gotten more sociable online

For a long time, the leaders of the biggest organizations in the world lagged the general population in the adoption of social media. Some argued they would never take to blogging and Twitter in great numbers, held back by fiduciary and legal issues. Recently, critics of online CEOs have pointed to Netflix’s Reed Hastings and an ill-advised Facebook update that may have violated regulatory rules. But nothing stops the march of progress, apparently, as a Weber Shandwick study released this week shows that 66% of the CEO’s in the world’s 50 biggest companies engaged online, a 20% increase from 2011. The study—Socializing Your CEO: From (Un)Social to Social—that “chief executives are decidedly testing the social waters,” according to Leslie Gaines-Ross, Weber Shandwick’s chief reputation officer. “By increasing their communications online, CEOs are showing they are listening to customers, are curious about how their products are being received, care about attracting the best talent, understand the need to better humanize themselves and are more in-tune with where their stakeholders are.” The study, reported by The Daily Dog, is available at Weber Shandwick’s website.

People remember social media posts better than book passages or people’s faces

A psychology study from the University of Warwick has determined that people have “a greater capacity for remembering posts on social media than faces or sentences from books,” writes Ian Steadman in Wired UK. the study showed 200 Facebook status updates, stripped of their context, to 32 participants side-by-side with lines from 200 books, also decontextualized. The participants were then shown the lines on a screen for a few seconds and asked whether they had seen them before. The participants were 1-1/2 times as likely to remember the Facebook post as a line from a book. When the experiment was repeated with people’s faces instead of book passages, the subjects were 2-1/2 times more likely to remember the posts. The key, according to researches is the language used in social media posts. Said researcher Laura Mickes, ““Writing that is easy and quick to generate is also easy to remember—the more casual and unedited, the more ‘mind-ready’ it is. Knowing this could help in the design of better educational tools as well as offering useful insights for communications or advertising.”

SoLoMo gains steam with national brands

If you haven’t heard the term before, get used to it: SoLoMo is the abbreviation for Social Local Mobile, a combination that is gathering momentum among national brands, according to Laurie Sullivan in MediaPost’s Online Media Daily. BIA/Kelley’s mobile ad revenue forecast points to significant growth in the category, from $664 million in $2011 to $5.8 billion in 2016. That’s annual compound growth of 54.2%. “National brands have begun to see a clear increase in performance for location-based targeted mobile ads,” Sullivan says. By way of example, Starbucks’ Howard Schultz told a conference that “mobile is mission-critical and needs to be funded and resourced appropriately,” according to a Rimma Kats article on Mobile Marketer. “There is a seismic change in consumer behavior that is linked to technology such as social and mobile platforms,” he said. “The level of investment capability in these new platforms, especially mobile, is mission-critical to our companies. It can’t be an after-thought—that capability needs a front seat at the table.”

Tesco horses around to defuse social media crisis

U.K. grocery chain Tesco took to newspaper ads to apologize for selling beef patties containing horsemeat, a situation that sparked considerable social media discussion. The company’s Twitter account, which usually adopts a light tone, was quiet as the Twitterverse got swept up with the #horsemeat hashtag until the chain finally decided to take the self-effacing approach with a tweet yesterday that read, “It’s sleepy time so we’re off to hit the hay!” The tweet has been retweeted nearly 2,500 times as of this morning. Some of the response has been hostile, and one newspaper ran a backlash story, pointing out that the company had to backtrack, “desperately apologising to offended clients.” According to Gordon MacMillan, writing for ,The Wall, the retweets are a sign of a positive payoff, although he still wonders how much it can help the chain’s “tattered reputation in the longer term.”

PR professionals stand tall when pressured to behave unethically

Movies and TV typically portray public relations as a sleazy profession, easily convinced to behave unethically in pursuit of their goals. It’s a fabrication, according to a study from Baylor University. A study of 30 senior PR professionals revealed that they viewed themselves as “an independent voice” and that they were not “mired by its perspective or politics.” The study focused on 30 practitioners from the U.S. and Australia with an average of 27 years of experience; 27 of them had served as chief public relations officers in their organizations, which covered the spectrum from for-profit corporations to non-profits and government agencies, as well as PR agencies. The subjects were often faced with a “kill the messenger” circumstance, and a few were fired or demoted “for refusing to do something that was blatantly unethical; two resigned when their advice was rejected, including one who refused to include false information in a press release,” according to an article in Science Daily. The research subjects talked about the need to maintain credibility and noted that being a “yes man” has no value.

Details matter when hosting a webinar

Data management company Dataversity used free webinars—a common content marketing tactic—to drive awareness of its conferences and services when it launched in 2011, but as the company gathered metrics from the sessions, the organization found details that allowed them to fine-tune the effort to attract larger audiences and generate more viable leads. from January to October of last year, Dataversity’s webinar registration jumped 91%, according to Marketing Sherpa reporter David Kirkpatrick. The company adjusted four distinct aspects of its webinars, starting with when they were conducted, finding that audiences responded to a fixed schedule: Tuesdays and Thursdays at 2 p.m. Eastern time. Offering a wide range of topics (all still related to the business) ensured there was something for everybody among the audience Dataversity was trying to attract; “We try to hit all of (the topics) each month to give our attendees a good selection to choose from,” according to the company’s executive editor, Shannon Kempe. The webinars are promoted through a variety of channels, ranging from a homepage listing of its three next sessions, email promotion (applying A/B testing on subject lines and design), and mention in the company’s email newsletter, along with the usual social media channels. Webinar sponsors add additional promotional bang for the webinars, usually coming from organizations the company works with; Dataversity offers partnerships to webinar sponsors, who get discounts for cross-promoting the sessions. In addition to the noteworthy boost in attendance, the company has also found that a reminder email an hour before the webinars increased attendance by 10% and that follow-up emails sent after the webinars achieved a 60% open rate.

FGSEO debuts with introduction of Facebook Graph Search

Facebook’s announcement early this week of a sophisticated search utility for gleaning information from your Facebook social graph instantly led to a flurry of posts about how brands with Facebook pages can optimize their content for greater discoverability. Writing for ZDNet, for example, Howard Lo speculates that the number of likes content gets will rise in importance. “Since search will begin with people connected to the Pages, the more people liking your Page means more people connected and thus the higher frequency of showing in search results,” he says. Lo also advises to make sure every field is filled out with relevant, properly-formatted information; you should avoid creating your own sub-categories. Include keywords in your posts just as you would for Google SEO; tag photos with locations and dates, as well as your page name. Meanwhile, onSearch Engine Land, Matt McPhee shares tips that Facebook has already offered: the name, category, vanity URL and information in your “About” section will produce better search results; keep your address updated if you have a location or local place Page; and make sure your content motivates people to interact with you on a regular basis.

LinkedIn bomb lands agency a new client

Authenticity is one of the most critical keys to effective social media. It may sound disingenuous, then, to carpet-bomb a prospect with messages through LinkedIn. But what if every one of those messages is sincere and authentic? that’s the approach Cornett Integrated Marketing Solutions took in an effort to land A&W as a client. The company—recently spun out from Yum Brands—relocated its headquarters to Cornett’s home town of Lexington, Kentucky. Every one of the agency’s employees sent a LinkedIn request to A&W’s president and its marketing director at exactly the same time, writes Mashable‘s Todd Wasserman. Marketing Director Sasrah Blasi was at a photo shoot and “all of the sudden I got about 35 LinkedIn notifications at once.” Each one was an individual story from a Cornett employee about “their personal relationships with A&W restaurants.” One recalled visits to A&W with a grandfather; another was about a first date whom the staffer went on to marry. It was a gamble, to be sure, but following a lengthy agency review, Cornett is now A&W’s agency of record.