Michael Stelzner at the WhitePaperSource has produced a pretty in depth report on the social media marketing industry. The industry now has enough years on it that this research is becoming more valuable to help make sense of this fast growing and often unwieldy area of the marketing mix.

The report is based on interviews of over 900 social media users of varying degrees. The findings are interesting in some areas and not so surprising in others. Some highlights include:

• The Top 10 social media questions that marketers want answered

• Experience levels are low with 72% of the marketers questioned having just started or only being involved in social media for a few months

• As a surprise to me, owners of 2- to 100-employee businesses were the most experienced (29.3% reporting doing social media marketing for years)

So why the quotation marks around the word ads in the title? It’s like that age old question of if a tree falls in the forest but there is no one there to hear it does it make a sound? This version however reads like, “If you place and “ad” on a website and nobody paid for it is it an “ad”?

In a continuation of the ExecTweets post of earlier TechCrunch reports that more and more third party apps are appearing as ads on the Twitter site. The only difference is that they did not need to pay to be there. In fact, Twitter is doing the courting.

Well, Twitter is making more noise by getting Microsoft to spend money with them for a sponsored page called ExecTweets according to Peter Kafka at All Things Digital. Because I personally don’t get why this is even attractive I’ll just give you the verbatim from the post to describe it:

Microsoft (MSFT), via its Federated Media ad network/platform/agency, is sponsoring a page that collects Tweets from various executives. Twitter will get an undisclosed payment for giving the site its stamp of approval and for promoting the site on Twitter itself. Federated says it plans on launching similar programs on Twitter with other clients.

The most popular social network in the world just can’t get a break. They try to be new and innovative (okay, or they’re trying to rip off Twitter), and users hate it. HATE it. And Facebook basically says, “Tough.”

But anyone who’s been on Facebook for a couple years has seen this all before: almost every redesign and tweak has been met with virulent “I HATE THE NEW FACEBOOK” groups and discussions. They hated the news feed and mini feed years ago, they hated Beacon, they hated last year’s redesign, and they hate this one, too. Let’s face it: people hate change. But so far, Facebook has stuck to its guns about half the time—and even when they’ve made changes, they’ve modified, but never fully rescinded anything (other than the TOS changes)—and FB continues to flourish through all the fracas.