LeBron James hopped on his bike Sunday afternoon to avoid the traffic caused by the Miami Marathon in order to get to work.  He also caused a twitpic frenzy.

Experts estimate fewer than 1 percent of American adults commute to work on a bicycle. Montana has the highest percentage of work commuters with 1.6 percent, followed by western states Oregon and Idaho, according to trafficsafety.org. In the Sunshine State, only 0.4 percent of work trips are on a bike. Florida also has the highest annual reported bike fatality rate in America at 115.7 per year.

The study results reported in Ad Age fall in with what I’ve been imagining in my head: the clicking of the ‘like’ button is rarely meaningful in the way we marketers wish it was.  I think researchers need to quantify this type of consumer activity (as well as place it in proper context) and I am sure there will be many more methods used to try and ferret out this increasingly important statistic.

For a few years now, brands have been touting frothy Facebook “like” numbers as evidence of their social-media acumen. But how many of those fans are actually bothering to take part in conversation with brands?

Not too many, as it turns out.

Slightly more than 1% of fans of the biggest brands on Facebook are actually engaging with the brands, according to a study from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, an Australia-based marketing think tank that counts Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and other major advertisers as its supporters.

To get to these findings, the researchers used one of Facebook’s own metrics, People Talking About This, the awkwardly-named running count of likes, posts, comments, tags, shares and other ways a user of the social network can interact with branded pages. It was unveiled last fall as a way of giving advertisers a sharper look at at the level of activity on their pages.

Researchers for the institute looked at this metric as a proportion of overall fan growth of the top 200 brands on Facebook over a six-week period back in October and they found the percentage of People Talking About This to overall fans to be 1.3%. If you subtract new likes, which only requires a click and in the minds of the researchers are akin to TV ratings, and isolate for more engaged forms of interaction, you’re left within an even smaller number: 0.45%. That means less than half a percent of people who identify themselves as liking a brand actually bother to create any content around it.

You might assume these are damning numbers. But this isn’t necessarily the case.

“I don’t think it’s a bad thing,” said Karen Nelson-Field, senior research associate for Ehrenberg-Bass Institute who describes herself as a “Facebook advocate.” “People need to understand what it can do for a brand and what it can’t do. Facebook doesn’t really differ from mass media. It’s great to get decent reach, but to change the way people interact with a brand overnight is just unrealistic.”

I saw this study linking grief with heart problems mentioned on both on Yahoo and the New York Times.  It reminded me of a great TED talk by Helen Fisher you should check out.

A long-term study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association has confirmed what 16th century poets have known all along: heartbreak can be deadly.

Past studies have linked heart problems with the grieving period after a loved one dies. Japanese cardiologists first identified the phenomenon in 1990. This new report, however, suggests that a grieving person is 21 times more susceptible to a heart attack right after the death of a beloved.

Doctors at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston tracked 2,000 heart attack patients over a period of five years. While they found that patients with a history of heart problems were more prone to attacks, even those with perfectly strong hearts were at risk for potentially deadly attacks in the immediate days after a close friend, partner or family member passed.

The risk is particularly great for women. A separate study, released in November, found that females are on average 7.5 times more likely than men to have a heart attack in the early stages of grieving. The number rises to 9.5 for women under 55. According to Dr. Abhiram Prasad, a Mayo Clinic cardiologist: “It’s the only cardiac condition where there’s such a female preponderance.” What they can’t understand is why women are more prone to the condition.

“Americans are spending more time on social media than volunteering, praying, talking on the phone, emailing, or even exercising.”
- the head of Forrester Research at LeWeb conference in Paris this past week

I’m not really sure how I feel about kids going to school entirely online, young ones in particular. The numbers discussed below surprised me – I did not realize this was happening at such a rate.

“When I was in high school” will soon refer to different memories and memes than what it currently does.

In a radical rethinking of what it means to go to school, states and districts nationwide are launching online public schools that let students from kindergarten to 12th grade take some—or all—of their classes from their bedrooms, living rooms and kitchens. Other states and districts are bringing students into brick-and-mortar schools for instruction that is largely computer-based and self-directed.

In just the past few months, Virginia has authorized 13 new online schools. Florida began requiring all public-high-school students to take at least one class online, partly to prepare them for college cybercourses. Idaho soon will require two. In Georgia, a new app lets high-school students take full course loads on their iPhones and BlackBerrys. Thirty states now let students take all of their courses online.

Nationwide, an estimated 250,000 students are enrolled in full-time virtual schools, up 40% in the last three years, according to Evergreen Education Group, a consulting firm that works with online schools. More than two million pupils take at least one class online, according to the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, a trade group.

Regular listeners – I dare you to NOT snort!

An article in the WSJ about the ongoing Frankfurt Motor Show discusses the seemingly conflicting consumers demands that luxury automakers are attempting to fulfill: desire for the best performance possible yet also a growing demand for greener, more enviro products.
It’s mentioned once in passing in the article but I think for us strategists the really interesting thing to ponder is whether or not the kids of today will age into the current automotive mindsets, or will they redefine them all together? I recently shared with you data on how fewer teens are even getting their licenses and the continued march towards megacities means cars become more of a burden to most – not the ultimate “freedom-defining” purchase they once were.

It’s a delicate balancing act, but one the luxury car makers are forced to perform as they figure out what the customer of the future will want. Volkswagen AG luxury brand Audi, for example, invited academics and industry experts to a conference Monday to discuss the challenges of a near future when 70% of the world’s people will live in congested mega-cities. They also predict attitudes about car ownership will be upended by a generation that cares more about slick smartphone apps than 0-to-60-miles-per-hour times.

The dichotomy is on view on BMW’s show stand, which features an electric BMW i3 concept car made of aluminum and carbon fiber with the motor over the rear axle and a top speed of 93 mph. Nearby is parked a new edition of the auto maker’s mighty M5 super sedan, with a 560-horsepower petroleum-fueled V-8. BMW stresses that the new M5 is both more powerful than its predecessor and 30% more fuel efficient.

Audi is giving prominence to small electric concept cars. It’s also emphasizing the idea that in the future, what will matter to its customers is more than a car, but “mobility,” a concept being bandied about at the Frankfurt show that emphasizes giving consumers information about how to get around in crowded cities, locate parking spaces and use smartphone apps to arrange car-sharing.

I’ve had two conversations in as many days where we’ve pondered “when are the kids going to rise up?”

In a presentation as part of its wider report on income, poverty and health insurance, the Census Bureau noted a big jump in the number of individuals and families doubling up. Census says 69.2 million, or 30%, were doubled-up in 2011, up from 61.7 million adults, or 27.7%, in 2007. “Doubled-up” households include at least one person 18 or older who isn’t enrolled in school and isn’t the householder, spouse or cohabiting partner of the householder.

Much of the increase comes from young people, ages 25-34, living with their parents. Some 5.9 million, or 14.2% of 25-to-34 year olds, lived with their parents in 2011, up from 4.7 million before the recession.

“These young adults who lived with their parents had an official poverty rate of only 8.4%, since the income of their entire family is compared with the poverty threshold,” David Johnson chief of the Housing and Household Economic Statistics Division at the U.S. Census Bureau said. “If their poverty status were determined by their own income, 45.3% would have had income falling below the poverty threshold for a single person under age 65.”

* people with jobs

After reading in the latest Pew Report how kids today don’t really use email (“that’s what Facebook is for”), I have been keeping my ears and eyes open for further evidence. In my highly unscientific survey of every kid and teen I’ve encountered since then – Pew is right.

I also saw this on Ypulse. The people doing the survey were asking specifically about email marketing, so we know they have a vested interest in justifying their continued receipt of paychecks, but I don’t find it hard to believe that kids recognize their eventual need of a cyber dropbox. Will we get to a place where an email will no longer be required to “sign-up” for something? Another electronic breadcrumb we can leave behind in its stead?

44% of students surveyed believe email has its place and will stick around, 41% are more inclined to think social media will overtake email and 15% just aren’t sure yet.

Students that believe email will stay say it’s because email is good for business and formal communication. Many also pointed out that an email address is required for many sites, and that social media and email pair well together to cover informal and formal communications.

Those that said email will be replaced believe it’s because email is not fast enough, some even going as far as calling it digital snail mail. This indicates that while many students use mobile devices to update their social media sites, they aren’t aware they can log in to their email account as well.

Many of the students only took their current use of email into account when responding, which may be why they’re inclined to believe email will die or they’re uncertain about its future.

Made me stop and look.