Attention marketers and brands. Did your idea generate major buzz? Nielsen Online is partnering with Adweek Media (a unit of The Nielsen Company) on this year’s Buzz Awards to celebrate innovative promotions, campaigns that caught fire and concepts that went from video to viral. Don’t let your efforts go unrecognized.

The deadline for submissions is August 18^th, so enter your campaigns here. We’ll award prizes across seventeen categories, ranging from viral marketing, radio and print to wireless promotion, public relations and social media. The Grand Prize winner snags a spread 4/c ad in Adweek, Brandweek and Mediaweek profiling the winning effort (valued at $64,100). Enter the 2008 Buzz Awards today.

I recently sat down with Steve McClellan at Adweek to discuss my new book, “Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000.” Check out the video interview here, where I discuss the importance of consumer loyalty to a brand’s strategy and how maintaining a brand’s credibility and listening closely to consumers can foster that loyalty. (Disclosure: Adweek’s parent, The Nielsen Company, is also the parent of Nielsen Online.)

During June 2008, the top 5 automotive sites remain the same with regards to total unique visitors, while the order has changed slightly as indicated in the graph below. Yahoo! Autos witnessed a significant increase in unique visitors from May to June (+24.2%), while AOL Auto has the most loyal repeat visitors from May to June (36.88%).

Interest in Autoblog, a highly-influential CGM site, continues to witness an upward trend over the last 13 months with an increase of roughly 50% in unique visitors from June ‘07 to June ‘08. Autoblog has moved from 11^th most visited auto site in May, to 9^th in June, surpassing Automotive.com. The growing interest in Autoblog is yet another confirmation of how important CGM is in today’s fast-paced world.

Note: Number in parentheses indicates May ranking in auto sites category.

I’ve gotten a bunch of questions over the past few days about what we’ll be covering in tomorrow’s Webinar - so here’s a preview:

1. In low involvement and high involvement retailer categories, what is the relationship between online research and offline purchase?
2. What types of online research are people doing that ultimately manifests itself in offline purchase?
3. What are the incremental sales associated with strong multi-channel execution?
4. Where should multi-channel retailers look for examples of strong multi-channel execution?

In addition to the related blog that I posted a couple of weeks ago, here’s another data point to whet your appetite.

Hope to catch up with y’all tomorrow.

In early June, Beet.TV was onsite at the Advertising 2.0 conference in New York. We discussed Nielsen’s online video measurement product, VideoCensus in the context of online advertising and what our clients are looking to measure. It comes down to this: who’s watching, what are they watching and for how long? All of which sounds eerily 1.0, doesn’t it? Click here to see the interview.