What were the top social media sites of 2008? ComScore came out with its worldwide traffic stats for November a few days ago (so these don’t include December). They are a mix of social networks and blogging platforms. Blogger, the orange line in the chart above, still rules the roost with an estimated 222 million unique worldwide visitors in November (up 44 percent from November, 2007). Facebook, the blue line, is on pace to pass it soon with 200 million unique visitors (up 116 percent). (Note, though, that this is more than the 140 million active users Facebook itself reports—go figure). MySpace is pretty steady at 126 million uniques. Wordpress is a close fourth and gaining with 114 million (up 68 percent). And Windows Live Spaces is down 22 percent to 87 million uniques...

Every business wants to know how engaging in social media can increase their bottom line. There are a number of challenges in explaining the value of social media: How do you show a direct benefit? How do you show an immediate return? Answering those two questions is challenging because we also know that...

Yesterday, I did a blog post encouraging others to tweet then retweet my blog post, as you know, I’m on a Twitter hiatus which gives a unique opportunity to try out some experiments. Here’s the stats from the experiment: In the last 24 hours, 199 folks tweeted these words “How Bloggers Should Inspire Retweets” within 24 hours...

If you didn’t hop on board the Social Media train in 2008 or haven’t heard about it (living under a rock perhaps?) 2009 is your year! It’s a big deal trend, and it shows no signs of slowing down. Don’t believe me? Check out Todd Mailcoat’s post on Stuntdubl.com - 9 Reasons You NEED Social Media Marketing in 2009. Developing a social media marketing strategy can be especially tough. The list of available Social Media sites seems endless (Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Facebook, LinkedIn, Technorati, StumbleUpon…I could go on forever) and there are tons of pitfalls and mistakes to make that could derail your campaign in seconds. However, using Social Media to your advantage can be extremely rewarding - leading to much higher traffic and better search rankings and in the end more money/sales/whatever for you. So to start the new year off right AgencyTool has compiled what we think is the best advice around when it comes to Social Media...

A new video demo has been released of the BBC’s concept for an interactive TV application, and as you can see, it has a specific social initiative that links to Facebook’s network, reports PaidContent. Running on Microsoft’s Mediaroom platform, the prototype of BBC’s interactive application has live video as well as on-demand video, featuring content from partners across the mainstream media outlets...

For the past two years, I've been doing an annual Blog benchmarking process that attempts to do a ROI analysis. Figuring out the Return on Investment for your blog can't be done with a single metric. I look at several metrics proposed by Avinash Kaushik. These include author contribution, audience growth, conversation rate, and authority. Then I look at the amount of time in my work flow and reflect on productivity. The last step is difficult: Translating tangible and intangible benefits into a dollar value. I do that with a grain of salt. The most valuable part of the blog benchmarking process is the reflection process and linking insights to making improvements. This is the stuff that can't necessarily be counted, but if you ignore it completely you really miss out on the opportunity to improve the quality of your blogging, which presumably increases the blog's ROI...

There’s been a lot written about where social media is going in 2009, lots of New Year’s predictions, but we focus here solely on corporate social media marketing. 2008 was social media crystal ballthe year where many more corporations realized they needed to get into the social media marketing game, and so far, that’s not abating in the first half of 2009. I can personally attest to that. So as the early folks get better at it, and the later adopters get into the social media marketing game, here are five trends to watch for...