A new survey seems to undermine reports of Twitter’s impact on movies by looking at the decision-making of individual users. Unfortunately, focusing on individual relationships, the analysis doesn’t take into account the structure of the network that actually generates the stimuli that individuals receive. First, the survey:

“Our research found a significant overestimation of the Twitter Effect,” Kevin Goetz, the president of OTX’s worldwide motion picture group, told me. “The number of people who use Twitter are only about 10% to 12% of all moviegoers. And when we asked people what was the most influential source of moviegoing word of mouth, Twitter finished last, at the bottom of the list.”

OTX did an online survey of nearly 1,500 moviegoers in mid- September, the bulk of the sample being moviegoers from age 13 to 49, the key moviegoing demographic group. When asked what was the most influential source for word of mouth, most respondents picked “family and friends and coworkers,” which scored 40%, followed by Facebook (31%), MySpace (9%), IMDB (8%), with Twitter and online message boards bringing up the rear with 6% each.

“The data suggests that all the media play for the Twitter Effect is really jumping the gun,” says Vinnie Bruzzese, the exec VP of OTX’s motion picture group. “It has an impact, but it’s coming much later on, not as initial reaction. There may be people with a lot of followers on Twitter, but the most influential people in terms of word of mouth are still the people you’re talking to every day — your friends and co-workers.”

But the science of networks dictates that the etiology of infection/influence for individual final users/consumers isn’t as important as the influence on the people in the center of the network, the hub.

As the great new book “Connected” explains, most natural human networks aren’t shaped like this:

But this:

In short, all nodes (aka consumers) are not created equally. As the caption notes, “even though C and D both have six friends, they have very different locations in the social network. C is much more central, and D is more peripheral; C’s friends have many friends themselves, whereas D’s friends tend to have few or no friends.”

Twitter users are, by definition, like person C in this graph — they’re hyper-communicators who are highly networked both online and off.

Health Care for America Now (HCAN) launched a bunch of cool blogads this morning promoting their “sick of it” campaign.

The best, in my opinion, does the very clever trick of pulling into the ads recent tweets that use the #sickofit tag.

If you look closely, you can see that all the clickable elements — tweeter’s nickname, hashtags, any URLs — are visible within the ad.

And if you go look at the ad live on Talkleft (or 100+ other blogs) you can see that each of those elements is separately clickable. This ad has not only the virtue of providing users with more information, timely information, but making the community part of the message. And isn’t that what social media is all about? Maybe we should start a #socialads4socialmedia tag?

Here are a couple of other ad versions running at the same time:

Congratulations to HCAN for kicking off the autumn ad season with a genius ad.

The ad, placed on the the epic FAILBLOG, touts a Twitter hashtag campaign (#failephant) attacking GOP healthcare policies. Here’s a copy of the current ad.

Now if we can just get HCAN to feature a feed of the #failephant tweets in their ad, this will be an unFAIL home-run. (See example at left.)

A colleague just saw this ad on Facebook promoting an SXSW panel. Clever.

There seems to be something of a cover-up going on at the HuffingtonPost.

Apparently embarrassed by the importance of sex-driven stories in powering its traffic, Huffpo has recently changed its “most popular stories” feature to obscure how many page impressions each story gets.

The stories now seem to be ranked according to # of comments (see example of the new format at the bottom of the post) but earlier this summer, you could see the number of raw impressions each story was getting.

While serious policy-related “politics” stories, which Huffpo pretends are its bread and butter, got 50k impressions, stories like “When your Boob tape is showing” and “Women’s Iconic Swimsuit movie moments” got millions.

For the record, here are screen grabs of the most popular Huffpo stories, as ranked by page views, for three different days earlier this summer, just before Huffpo decided to hide its skin-fixation:

And here the new format, which obscures but not entirely hides, the Huffpo readers’ hormonal urges:

Our scheduling and versioning UI just took a nice hop forward. (Nearly a leap?)

After lots of agonizing, things got a lot easier when we realized that our ad units cry out to be displayed horizontally in the admin interface. Having turned the interface on its side, suddenly an ad scheduling calendar suddenly made a lot more sense.

The interface still isn’t perfect, but it is a big improvement over what we had yesterday.

Here’s what you see after you’ve uploaded two versions of an ad. You click on the dates below each version to indicate when that version should run. (You can add as many versions as you want.) This illustration is for a one week ad. If you wanted to run a one month ad, you’d see 31 days. (Click to enlarge.)

If you indicate that three ads will run on one day, the machine automatically distributes the SOV proportionally.

And if you want to change the weighting for a particular day (or all the days with that particular set of versions), you click a day in the list in the left column and get a screen like the following one, in which you can then customize the weighting for that set of creatives.

Obviously this UI still isn’t perfect, so we need your suggestions and critiques… either in the comments or by e-mail.

We launched a new ad format over at DailyKos in April. Called the “Action Tag,” the ad format allows an advertiser to promote a specific action after a post that deals with a relevant topic area. The SEIU helped inspire the ad functionality and been using Action Tags to promote actions around health care and employee free choice.

This weekend, some of the folks at DailyKos started to debate the new functionality, weighing in on its pros and cons. The discussion has been lengthy and inspiring, and has provided some good ideas for improving the functionality, which we’ll begin to impliment shortly in concert with SEIU and Dkos.

Above and beyond the particulars of the debate, I’ve enjoyed the fact that the debate has revived a discussion that began four years ago about an risque ad for Turner Broadcasts’ reality TV remake of Gilligan’s Island. It’s amazing to see the pie-fight meme live on in the Kos community.

Some deep chord sounded in me on reading the NYT’s story about the John Lennon museum display in New York capped with this image:

Near the exit is “Telephone Peace,” a white telephone mounted on a wall, with a card telling visitors to answer the phone when it rings.

“This is something we did at the show in 2000,” Mr. Henke said. “Yoko would periodically call in and speak to whoever answers.”

Ms. Ono seemed amused at the prospect. “Yes, you pick up the phone,” she said, “and it will be me.”

Why?