Marketing Automation:

• One of the many growing marketing automation firms, Eloqua, put together an analysis of its clients' data to show how many different campaign elements existed in their average campaigns, and how complex were each of those. It showed lots of advertising and PR efforts with a relative dearth of lead nurturing.

Email:

• Email list retention is a losing game over time, with ESPs interpreting rules and bounces almost always in favor of dropping a name from a list. An extreme example surfaced with major list fans being dumped because people to whom they've forwarded-to-a-friend decided to unsubscribe using the original email's unsub link.

Advertising:

• Perhaps the 2012 estimates for this year's media spend were a bit exuberant, according to recently downgraded predictions.

Privacy:

• Perhaps informing why it appears easy to gin up anti-advertising web privacy concerns, a recent poll showed that people misapprehend how companies like Google and Facebook make money, many assuming that they sell private data.

Social:

• LinkedIn had doubled its membership ever since it reinvigorated its acquisition efforts not long before its IPO.