PR 2.0: January 2009

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Anheuser-Busch Debuts AB-Extras.com; Fuses PR with Social Media to Humanize Stories and Ads

Disclosure: I am collaborating with Anheuser-Busch on the creation and release of AB-Extras.com


Today Anheuser-Busch announced AB-Extras.com – a social media destination for Bud fans 21 years of age and older to reveal the human element and stories behind the ads that will premier during the Big Game.

AB-Extras.com is a unique social platform for the internal PR team at Anheuser-Busch to also work more effectively with traditional and digital press and bloggers using the tools and services that they rely upon to publish and share stories.

AB-Extras.com features exclusive content using a combination of social tools and networks such as Social Media Releases (SMRs), YouTube, Blip.TV, and flickr, hosted on a blog platform. At the very least, it is a dedicated online newsroom that aggregates and packages disparate social elements from across the Web into a contextualized storyboard that streamlines the viewing, sourcing, and distribution of relevant information.

The press team at Anheuser-Busch is actively exploring the inherent benefits and opportunities of genuinely participating in the important and relevant conversations that are transpiring across the Social Web.

They’re learning from individual experiences driven by this new form of engagement to further evolve its communications methodologies and practices and also improve the foundation for building relationships. As the team is listening and internalizing activity, analysis, and feedback, they will also define new policies and amendments to the PR regiment in order to embrace public conversations through social networks and micro communities including Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed.

I’m also learning that much in the same way that public companies abide by existing processes and language when communicating through press releases for example, there are guidelines and procedures designed to help alcohol companies practice corporate responsibility not only in PR, but also in online community engagement.

I’m looking forward to working with Anheuser-Busch to further explore new ways to enhance and humanize the interaction between companies, journalists, bloggers, and the very consumers who contribute to the interpretation, perception, and dissemination of their story.

Press Release on PitchEngine




Anheuser-Busch Debuts AB-Extras.com

Related reading on PR 2.0:

- SEC To Recognize Corporate Blogs as Public Disclosure, What This Means for Wires and Press Releases
- Social Media Releases In Action
- The Definitive Guide to Social Media Releases
- The Future of the Social Media Release is in Your Hands
- The Poetry of Social Networking to Court Customers and Invest in Relationships
- Twitter Tools for Community and Communications Professionals
- The Essential Guide to Social Media
- The Social Media Manifesto
- Introducing The Conversation Prism

Connect with me on:
Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Plaxo, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, Jaiku, Social Median, or Facebook
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posted by Brian Solis at 7:02 PM 3 comments

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Growth for Newspapers Online? Yes and No


Source

Nielsen Online is reporting that nine out of the top 10 newspapers experienced growth in online traffic between December 2007 to December 2008. The average growth across the board equated to 16%.

Here's the breakdown:

NYTimes.com
Dec 07 (000): 17,1777
Dec 08 (000): 18,187
Percentage Change: 16

USATODAY.com
Dec 07 (000): 9,939
Dec 08 (000): 11,420
Percentage Change: 15

WashingtonPost.com
Dec 07 (000): 8.478
Dec 08 (000): 9,470
Percentage Change: 12

LA Times
Dec 07 (000): 4,607
Dec 08 (000): 7,963
Percentage Change: 73

Wall Street Journal Online
Dec 07 (000): 5,409
Dec 08 (000): 7,235
Percentage Change: 34

Daily News Online
Dec 07 (000): 2,956
Dec 08 (000): 5,883
Percentage Change: 99

Chicago Tribune
Dec 07 (000): 3,891
Dec 08 (000): 5,235
Percentage Change: 35

New York Post
Dec 07 (000): 2,852
Dec 08 (000): 4,557
Percentage Change: 60

Boston.com
Dec 07 (000): 4,364
Dec 08 (000): 4,086
Percentage Change: -6

SFGate
Dec 07 (000): 2,785
Dec 08 (000): 3,503
Percentage Change: 26

While online traffic is up, print circulation and advertising is escalating downward. And, according to research conducted by Erica Smith, a graphics designer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the industry experienced roughly 15,554 newspapers job cuts in 2008.

There is a great deal of attention focused on the declination of the media industry as it struggles to reinvent itself in the era of the social web. Services such as TheMediaisDying on Twitter actively publishe news related to layoffs and closures throughout the media business. At the time of this post, just over 10,000 people had subscribed to the Twitter feed.

The shift from print and broadcast to online consumption is pervasive across all mediums - dailies, weeklies, monthlies, newsletters, radio, TV. Our behavior for discovering and sharing information and content, and perhaps most paramount, our attention, is migrating away from mediums that have operated unchanged for generations.

While some news properties are experiencing double, to almost three-digit growth, there's much work to be done. The most important opportunity for any entity in the business of information publishing must now actively engage in the practice of information exchange propeled by human interaction. It's the metamorphosis from a one-to-many broadcast model to both a one-to-one and many-to-many network powering democratized, on-demand news and information. It's the establishment and empowerment of legions of people throughout key online communities to represent a new generation of digital delivery persons, satallites, wires, and antennas to carry curated information directly to their social graph and in turn, the graphs of their peers.

It's not enough for media properties to migrate to blogging platforms, deploy RSS feeds, open up comments, post on Twitter, or create fan pages on Facebook. Media properties must embrace two-way channels to share, listen, and cultivate the relationships that will help usher in a new genre of active and dedicated communities or risk obsolence in the face of traditional competition, financial crises, as well as the real world pandemic of attention scarcity.

Please share stories and cases of media properties who are leading by example in the comments section. The best way to learn is to spotlight and analyze the pioneering work of those who are breaking new ground and demonstrating, through failure and success, new models for engaging and empowering effective and enriching information exchanges.

UPDATE: TechCrunch on The New York Times fourth quarter earnings...
Total advertising revenues were down 13.1 percent in the quarter to $1.8 billion. Of that, its total Internet advertising revenues (from NYTimes.com, Boston.com, and About.com primarily) was only $81.9 million, down 3.5 percent. Internet advertising only accounts for 12 percent of the company’s annual revenues (for the year, it made $309 million from Internet advertising, up 9.3 percent). But as one of the largest media sites on the Web it is an important bellwether.

Related reading on PR 2.0:

- Extra Extra, Newspapers Respond to the Social Web
- State of the Twittersphere - Q4 2008
- The Poetry of Social Networking to Court Customers and Invest in Relationships
- Twitter Tools for Community and Communications Professionals
- The State of Social Media 2008
- The Social Revolution is Our Industrial Revolution
- The Essential Guide to Social Media
- The Social Media Manifesto
- Introducing The Conversation Prism

Connect with me on:
Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Plaxo, Plurk, BackType, Social Median, or Facebook
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posted by Brian Solis at 7:51 AM 5 comments

Monday, January 26, 2009

Is FriendFeed the Next Conversation Platform?



I recently discussed the viability of Twitter evolving beyond a micro community into a standardized platform for macro conversations. It's certainly the path Facebook is traversing. And, both are making significant progress in the race to syndicate and aggregate the discussions that are important to us within our respective social networks.

There is another emerging platform worth discussing as it is quietly growing into an alternative solution to the disparate communities that are pervasive throughout the social web.

Ladies and gentlemen, add FriendFeed to your radar for listening, participation, and relationship building.

Defining FriendFeed is easier said than done. In fact, it's less of a competitor to Twitter and more of a vertical threat to Facebook's prized News Feed. The News Feed feature in Facebook is considered the central nervous system to the social graph. It powers conversations, connections, and collaboration. As Facebook Connect "connects" you and your social graph across the Web, it will increase in value as it aggregates all outside activity into one centralized stream for your friends, and friends of friends, to review, interpret, and respond. Also, don't rule out an acquisition of Twitter either.

FriendFeed is one of the most prominent examples of a dedicated lifestream (brandstream). It channels your social activity and also that of your social graph into one simplified river of relevance. As new items appear in the stream, it invites bookmarking and threaded conversations that promote dialog. For example, you can import activity from flickr, youtube, twitter, backtype, blogs, Last.fm, Seesmic, Upcoming, LinkedIn, Yelp, Amazon, Picasa, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Disqus, and 12 seconds. The growing list of services currently sits at 60, but technically you can integrate any service that generates an RSS feed. Most important is FriendFeed's ability to port your Facebook status into your stream. Technically, you can now host, contribute to and participate in a more comprehensive "news feed" with the potential of reaching a far greater, or perhaps focused and dedicated audience of people who either aren't on Facebook or prefer something different.



FriendFeed is also unique in that it offers custom rooms to host and join dedicated conversations related to any given topic. Your stream can also export to websites, outside communities, blogs and social profiles.

We celebrated Twitter's rise to 4.5 million uniques in just over two years, which was enough to surpass Digg's highly regarded traffic milestone. In less than a year, FriendFeed is nearing one million unique visitors, representing a 3,170% increase.



When compared to other social aggregation and lifestream services, FriendFeed's trajectory is incredibly promising. You'll also note that the category represented through the following services is also on the rise, with Tumblr at 1.4 million unique visitors, AOL's SocialThing realizing 186% annual growth and Google's Jaiku open micro community platform is still on the rise with a 33% increase over the last year..



If you compare FriendFeed to other micro communities, it appears to be the only platform that is not only growing, but also cultivating an active and significant user base. Plurk is the largest alternative micro community with 256,000 unique visitors and Yammer places a distant third at 86,000.



FriendFeed will only continue to increase in significance, broadening its reach, expanding its user base, and diversifying its user base from early adopters to mainstream market catalysts over the next year. This momentum will continue to be fueled by the addition of new and popular services combined with the dedicated evangelism and amplified awareness generated by influential (and passionate) users such as Robert Scoble, Louis Gray, Chris Brogan, Laura Fitton, Michael Arrington, Dan Farber, Chris Messina, Brian Oberkirch, Loic Le Meur, and Dave Winer. And, it's not just the usual voices who will propel FriendFeed as a viable conversation platform, it extends to the many, many others who are authoritative and trusted within their dedicated spheres of influence and reach.

I'd love to hear your views, opinions, and predictions...

Related reading on PR 2.0:

- The Poetry of Social Networking to Court Customers and Invest in Relationships
- Top 40 Must Read Posts on PR 2.0 in 2008
- Twitter Tools for Community and Communications Professionals
- The State of Social Media 2008
- The Social Revolution is Our Industrial Revolution
- The Essential Guide to Social Media
- The Social Media Manifesto
- Introducing The Conversation Prism

Connect with me on:
Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Plaxo, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, Jaiku, Social Median, or Facebook
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posted by Brian Solis at 9:41 AM 22 comments

Friday, January 23, 2009

Is Twitter a Viable Conversation Platform?



Twitter has us in a flutter.

Ev Williams, Biz Stone and team have created something so significant, that it's changing how millions of people communicate with each other - and it's only growing beyond imagination.

Twitter boasts a substantial community that is emphatically hyperactive, evangelical, and religiously loyal - all in productive and positive ways. The first two legitimate competitors, Jaiku, acquired by Google, and Pownce, a company co-founded by Digg's Kevin Rose, ultimately learned that Twitter's momentum was untouchable. Jaiku is migrating to an open source model to allow developers to roll-their-own microblogging services and deploy them on the Google App Engine. Pownce was acquired by Six Apart and shuttered, in its current form, for the time being.

In just a couple of years, Twitter has soared to new heights reaching 4.5 million visitors - that's a 752.9% increase in just one year.



At its current volume of traffic, Twitter recently surpassed Digg according to Hitwise.



Twitter not only represents a detour in human interaction, its community is building highways, roads, cities, and a support infrastructure to power this new direction. It has created its own vibrant and flourishing ecosystem known as the Twitterverse.

From this point of view, Twitter already has created an important and promising new conversation platform.

Twitter has influenced how:

- Media connects with audiences

- Businesses listen to and respond with customers

- Communications professionals, marketers, and advertisers connect with the new world of influencers

- Journalists, bloggers, analysts, event organizers can get help and answers from the community, instantly

- Everyday people can create an in-demand personal brand to open new doors and create new destinies

- People are made aware of news and important information from all over the world

As Twitter gains in relevance and prominence, its conversation platform will ring the alarms of any business that monetizes relationships, connections, and information exchange.

Simultaneously, another company is also building a conversation platform that will force an intersection with any direct and perceived competitor and further reshape the mechanics of human interaction.

Facebook is a dominant player in the world of social networks and reports show that Facebook is now nearly twice the size of MySpace worldwide.



According to Comscore, 222 million people visited Facebook, representing a 10.8% monthly growth rate. Facebook boasts nearly 100 million more worldwide users than MySpace, which welcomed 4 million new users in December - bringing the total user base to 125 million. Perhaps more noteworthy, Facebook served 80 billion monthly page views in December with MySpace only serving 43 billion, receiving 22% of the total Internet audience in December. 22%!

Facebook's news feed combined with the new Facebook Connect infrastructure is setting the stage for a global conversation platform that may go unrivaled.

For those who aren't yet familiar with Facebook Connect, it is a technical bridge that grants access to partner communities using your Facebook profile/identity. Not only can you log in using one ID, it also sends the associated activity from each respective network back to your activity feed within Facebook for review and commentary from those within your social graph and the corresponding network of your contacts.

For example, if you’re commenting on a blog hosted on the Moveable Type platform, you can now login with your Facebook details and not only will your comment and link to your Facebook profile appear on the blog, the activity of commenting is also linked back into your activity feed for your friends and colleagues to see. Facebook Connect partners already number in the hundreds of the most popular networks worldwide. Twitter is one of them.

Facebook is already hosting channeled conversations sourced from Twitter, FriendFeed, and many other notable communities with an audience that is undeniably substantial, captive, and vigorous.

Recently, Facebook quietly explored the prospect of acquiring Twitter, which resulted in both companies concluding discussions without alignment.

 As a conversation platform, Facebook will only gain in importance, creating a precedence that may prevail as it aggregates the ability to share, read, and respond across multiple communities, from one centralized social hub.

In the meantime, Twitter will also continue to increase its stature as both a category-defining conversation platform and also an illustrious community that will further influence the dynamics of engagement and dialog, while attracting new users en masse.

UPDATE: Kara Swisher on whether or not Facebook, or someone else, should take another run at Twitter.

Related reading on PR 2.0:

- The Poetry of Social Networking to Court Customers and Invest in Relationships
- Top 40 Must Read Posts on PR 2.0 in 2008
- Twitter Tools for Community and Communications Professionals
- The State of Social Media 2008
- The Social Revolution is Our Industrial Revolution
- The Essential Guide to Social Media
- The Social Media Manifesto
- Introducing The Conversation Prism

Connect with me on:
Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Plaxo, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, Jaiku, Social Median, or Facebook
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posted by Brian Solis at 9:40 AM 7 comments

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Tracking the Obama Inauguration Across the Social Web: PeopleBrowsr Helps You Listen and Engage

Disclosure, I'm an adviser to PeopleBrowsr...



In early December, we released a public alpha of PeopleBrowsr, an attention-centered dashboard for managing your online relationships, brand management, and communication in Twitter and across multiple social networks - all from one place.

The public alpha is running incredibly well and thanks to everyone who contributed feedback, ideas, and recommendations, the public beta will be even more incredible.

If you're a brand manager, communications or customer service professional, community manager, or on the product support or development team, PeopleBrowsr may very well be the most comprehensive, real time monitoring and engagement solution available today. My good friend Sukhjit, created a phenomenal video demonstrating how she tracked conversations, images, and videos related to the inauguration of President Obama on Twitter and across the Social Web - as it happened.

Hopefully this helps you...



Connect with me on:
Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Plaxo, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, Jaiku, Social Median, or Facebook
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posted by Brian Solis at 9:54 AM 3 comments

Monday, January 19, 2009

Social Networks Grow Up: More Adults Connecting Online


(cc) Brian Solis

As Social Media permeates our rhythm and routine for discovering, creating and sharing content and information online, the gap between generations is rapidly diminishing.

PEW Research released a new report that documents the increase in social networking activity among U.S.-based adults for both personal and professional relationships.

Just over one third (35%) of American adult Internet users have created a profile on an online social network, four times as many as three years ago. However, it is still much lower than the 65% of online American teens who use social networks to showcase their personality and also communicate with others.

Prior to reviewing the in-depth findings by PEW, we can assume that:

- LinkedIn caters to an older demographic that is more interested in cultivating professional connections and promoting expertise.

- Facebook, while attracting a broader age group of users, is still highly focused on younger demographics and facilitating personal connections and events.

- MySpace, well, is MySpace, and largely hosts the majority of America's youth for personal interaction and self-expression/promotion.

According to the study, adults make up a larger portion of the US population than teens, which is why the 35% number represents a larger number of users than the 65% of online teens who
also use online social networks. Still, younger online adults are much more likely than their older counterparts to use social networks, with 75% of adults 18-24 using these networks, compared to just 7% of adults 65 and older. At its core, use of online social networks is still a phenomenon of the young.

Among adults, MySpace is the most popular online social network. 50% of adult social network users age 18 and older are on MySpace, while 22% of adult social network users have an account on Facebook. Another 6% have an account on LinkedIn, 2% have an account on Yahoo, and 1% each have accounts on YouTube and Classmates.com.

PEW Research Observes:

- 75% of online adults 18-24 have a profile on a social network site
- 57% of online adults 25-34 have a profile on a social network
- 30% of online adults 35-44 have one
- 19% of online 45 to 54 year olds have a profile
- 10% of online 55 to 64 year olds have a profile
- 7% of online adults 65 and older have a profile

Online social network applications are mainly used for explaining and maintaining personal networks, and most adults, like teens, are using them to connect with people they already know.

- 89% use their online profiles to keep up with friends
- 57% use their profile to make plans with friends
- 49% use them to make new friends
- Other uses: organize with other people for an event, issue or cause; flirt with someone; promote themselves or their work; make new business contacts

Most users maintain multiple profiles, generally on different sites.

- 51% of social network users have two or more online profiles
- 43% have only one online profile

Among social network users with multiple profiles:

- 83% have those profiles on different sites
- 17% have those profiles on one site
- 24% have multiple profiles so they can keep up with friends on different sites
- 19% have multiple profiles to separate the personal and the professional
- 6% just use different sites
- 4% have different profiles for different parts of their personality
- 4% have older profiles on sites they do not use anymore





The experimentation with social networking will only continue to pervade our culture, the dynamic for how we foster and cultivate relationships, and continue to enhance foundation for interpersonal communication, both in the real world and online. The ends will meet in the middle - the fuse is already burning.

Connect with me on:
Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Plaxo, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, Jaiku, Social Median, or Facebook
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posted by Brian Solis at 10:15 AM 9 comments

Friday, January 16, 2009

Which Blog Platforms Power the Top 100 Blogs?


Source

Is 2009 the year you finally dive into the world wide web of blogging? Or, is it the year you switch blogging platforms or services? It is for me. In fact, I'm exploring the near-term migration of PR 2.0 from Blogger to Wordpress (both self-hosted).

Make no mistake, even with the popularity of micro communities such as Twitter, aggregated streams/lifestreams such as Strands and FriendFeed, and tumblelogs (Tumblr), blogging is still one of the most effective and visible stages to spotlight your expertise, thoughts, advice, opinions, and insight (for you and your company.) It fuels discovery and it conveys adeptness and reinforces participation.

So how do you determine which solution to support?

For the rest of us who are overwhelmed with choices and recommendations, perhaps there's guidance in the curated platforms that other top bloggers have embraced. We can assume that they have tried and tested multiple solutions, settling on a blog formula that allows them to customize and publish content efficiently and effectively. At the very least, our choices are narrowed into a palatable array for quicker dissemination.

To help, Pingdom released an interesting study that reveals the numbers behind the most popular blog platforms and the most linked-to bloggers using them.



Blog Software (Self-Hosted Blogs)

According to the study, Pingdom identified Wordpress as the top choice among the most "popular" bloggers according to Technorati's Top 100, powering 27 out of 100 blogs.

Movable Type was second with 12 out of 100.

Only 8 blogs use a custom-made blog platform.

Drupal, a general purpose CMS, boasts 4 blogs.

Blogging Services (Third-party service providing blog software and hosting)

While WordPress is the more popular solution among those who self-host their blogs, Movable Type's Typepad excels to the top of the list for bloggers using services based on blog platforms (Typepad on Movable Type, WordPress on WordPress, Blogger on Google's Blogspot, etc.)

It's important to note that more than 1/3 of the top 100 bloggers use a blogging service.

Typepad powers 16 of the top 100 blogs.

AOL-owned Blogsmith (used by Weblogs, Inc.) drives 14 of the top 100.

Wordpress.com is used by 5.

Blogger (Google) fuels 3.
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Top Blogs and the Corresponding Platforms

Blog Name, Technorati Rank, Platform

Perez Hilton 18 Wordpress
Problogger 46 Wordpress
Chris Brogan 69 Wordpress
Zen Habits 77 Wordpress
Copyblogger 89 Wordpress
Think Progress 27 Wordpress
VentureBeat 56 Wordpress
/Film 80 Wordpress
Global Voices Online 95 Wordpress
The Caucus Blog - NYTimes 22 Wordpress
Bits Blog - NYTimes 51 Wordpress
Freakonomics - NYTimes 70 Wordpress
Pajamas Media 45 Wordpress
Just jared 86 Wordpress
Smitten Kitchen 97 Wordpress
Hot Air 48 Wordpress
Neatorama 59 Wordpress
TechCrunch 2 Wordpress
Smashing Magazine 10 Wordpress
Washington Wire - WSJ 38 Wordpress
Michelle Malkin 39 Wordpress
Daily Blog Tips 63 Wordpress
Yanko Design 81 Wordpress
Mashable 11 Wordpress
Roy Tanck’s weblog 20 Wordpress
CrunchGear 49 Wordpress
Delicious:days 99 Wordpress
Popwatch 76 Typepad
Seth’s Blog 14 Typepad
The Daily Dish 21 Typepad
Threat Level - Wired Blogs 24 Typepad
Gadget Lab - Wired Blogs 26 Typepad
Wired Science - Wired Blogs 31 Typepad
The Pioneer Woman 32 Typepad
Listening Post -Wired Blogs 52 Typepad
Political Radar 53 Typepad
The Underwire - Wired Blogs 57 Typepad
Epicenter - Wired Blogs 60 Typepad
Danger Room - Wired Blogs 61 Typepad
Geekdad - Wired Blogs 71 Typepad
How to Change the World 73 Typepad
Marginal Revolution 82 Typepad
Game | Life - Wired Blogs 93 Typepad
Engadget 4 Blogsmith
TMZ 23 Blogsmith
Joystiq 25 Blogsmith
BloggingStocks 29 Blogsmith
TUAW 30 Blogsmith
Cinematical 33 Blogsmith
Gadling 36 Blogsmith
Download Squad 37 Blogsmith
TV Squad 40 Blogsmith
Autoblog 43 Blogsmith
Slashfood 47 Blogsmith
Luxist 85 Blogsmith
Engadget Mobile 94 Blogsmith
Engadget Japanese 100 Blogsmith
Power Line Blog 96 Movable Type
Huffington Post 1 Movable Type
Talking Points Memo 35 Movable Type
Gothamist 66 Movable Type
Beppe Grillo’s Blog 74 Movable Type
http://kottke.org 78 Movable Type
Microsiervos 79 Movable Type
Stereogum 91 Movable Type
TreeHugger 28 Movable Type
Pharyngula 92 Movable Type
ReadWriteWeb 15 Movable Type
Boing Boing 5 Movable Type
Gizmodo 3 Gawker Media platform
Lifehacker 6 Gawker Media platform
Gawker 12 Gawker Media platform
Kotaku 34 Gawker Media platform
Consumerist 50 Gawker Media platform
Valleywag 67 Gawker Media platform
Defamer 87 Gawker Media platform
Deadspin 88 Gawker Media platform
Apartment Therapy 65 Custom
Seeking Alpha 72 Custom
Ars Technica 9 Custom
The Corner on NRO 44 Custom
Google Blogoscoped 58 Custom
MacRumors 75 Custom
A List Apart 83 Custom
Ben Smith’s Blog 41 Custom
GigaOM 55 Wordpress.com
I Can Has Cheezburger? 13 Wordpress.com
CNN Political Ticker 17 Wordpress.com
Scobleizer 84 Wordpress.com
Swampland - TIME 90 Wordpress.com
Dooce 42 Drupal
NewsBusters 62 Drupal
Crooks and Liars 64 Drupal
43 Folders 98 Drupal
The Official Google Blog 7 Blogger
PostSecret 16 Blogger
The Sartorialist 54 Blogger
Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com 68 Bricolage
Gigazine 19 Expression Engine
Daily Kos 8 Scoop

In order to maximize the full opportunities and benefits that strategic blogging can yield, it is highly recommended that you use blog software or a service that you personally (or with the help of experts) customize to match the brand and the persona you wish to covey - from the design aesthetics to the URL - and everything in between.

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posted by Brian Solis at 9:39 AM 14 comments

Thursday, January 15, 2009

TweetSuite Links Conversations Between Blogs and Twitter



I've been observing Dan Zarrella's work from a distance for some time and this is the first post dedicated to his work. However, he is someone whom I also hope to collaborate with in the near-term.

Zarrella recently announced TweetSuite, a plugin for WordPress that integrates tweetback functionality into blogs. Much in the same way that trackbacks or linkbacks showcase inbound blogs linking to respective posts, tweetbacks monitor and display individual tweets that also feature links to specific blog content.



TweetSuite also offers the ability for people to directly tweet the post from your blog as well as retweet (RT) the specific tweets listed in the tweetback directory.

The suite provides several widget options to showcase most-tweeted posts, recently-tweeted, and the most favorited tweets.

It's the seamless fusion between the blogosphere and twitterville, tying conversations across two of the most prominent properties defining the Social Web.

Zarrella's work is poignant as it is timely. The conversation continues to migrate and evolve beyond the blogosphere and Twitter is the catalyst for the organic and rapidly multiplying interaction within micro communities. Facebook, FriendFeed, among others are also fueling the proliferation of distributed conversations and tools such as TweetSuite centralize dispersed dialog into one central location for context and perspective.

Related reading on PR 2.0:

- The Poetry of Social Networking to Court Customers and Invest in Relationships
- Top 40 Must Read Posts on PR 2.0 in 2008
- Twitter Tools for Community and Communications Professionals
- The Socialization of Your Personal Brand Parts I - III
- In the Social Web, We Are All Brand Managers
- The State of Social Media 2008
- The Social Revolution is Our Industrial Revolution
- The Essential Guide to Social Media
- The Social Media Manifesto
- Introducing The Conversation Prism
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Connect with me on:
Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Plaxo, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, Jaiku, Social Median, or Facebook
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posted by Brian Solis at 6:01 AM 3 comments

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

The Intersection of Facebook & MySpace


Source

An interesting and highly anticipated phenomenon occurred in December 2008, one that received very little fanfare.

December was a particularly busy month for Mark Zuckerberg's high profile social network. According to Web metrics firm Hitwise, Facebook’s share of US Internet traffic hit an all time high on Christmas Eve 2008, earning 2.18% of all US Internet visits.



Perhaps more significant, the traffic volume between Myspace and Facebook intersected at the end of 2008 with Facebook surpassing MySpace according to my analysis of several traffic charts.



Was the surge in December activity, particularly Christmas Eve, a fluke or is it representative of a true shift in market share leadership?

2008 was an interesting year for both social networks. Facebook spent the first quarter of the year rolling with the swells of up and down traffic, sparking debates as to whether or not the company actually hit a plateau. MySpace, on the other hand, leveled-off and actually realized a dip in traffic from August to November.

Many experts and alpha users were also crying out with claims of social network fatigue with the onslaught of new networks as well as growing demand for participation in micro communities such as Twitter and FriendFeed.

My 2009 prediction is that Social Syndication and Aggregation will be the new content syndication and participation. Meaning, that finding social services that can broadcast your personality, expertise, thought leadership, and vision to communities that reach your audiences while utilizing a hub that allows you to participate in each community, from one place will transform and improve our foundation for success.

Facebook is a hub for finding and sharing content as well as cultivating relationships that can deliver value to all parties - all within one ecosystem. MySpace is perceived as a socially-rooted network ripe with self-indulgent personal billboards. As we all know, perception is everything. Launching a developer network is a start. Pursuing a new model for the music industry is a sound business move. Evolving the architecture and foundation of MySpace to renew the experience and provide a more effective platform for showcasing personality, expertise, and talent is going to help propel MySpace once again...among other things of course.

Either way, Facebook will continue to escalate in 2009. With the launch and proliferation of Facebook Connect, the social Web will contact and quite possibly orbit around Facebook and the individuals who power it.

It's the difference between a network and a platform. Or expounding the example above, it's potentially a planet versus a solar system.

UPDATE: According to Comscore, Facebook's year-end jump in traffic may only be a preview of what's to come. Comscore reports that MySpace still holds a notable lead as well as increased engagement time over facebook.


Here are the numbers according to Comscore's 2008 report:

MySpace 76 million - 10% yearly growth
Facebook 55 million - 57% year growth
Classmates 16.6 million - 66% yearly growth
LinkedIn 2.9 million - 115% yearly growth
Bebo 4.9 million
Ning 3.9 million - 388% yearly growth

Related reading on PR 2.0:

- The Poetry of Social Networking to Court Customers and Invest in Relationships
- Top 40 Must Read Posts on PR 2.0 in 2008
- Twitter Tools for Community and Communications Professionals
- The Socialization of Your Personal Brand Parts I - III
- In the Social Web, We Are All Brand Managers
- The State of Social Media 2008
- The Social Revolution is Our Industrial Revolution
- The Essential Guide to Social Media
- The Social Media Manifesto
- Introducing The Conversation Prism
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posted by Brian Solis at 8:47 AM 3 comments