I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that social networking is popular. According to Nielsen Online, it’s become a whole lot more popular. From December 2007 to December 2008, social networks or blogs account for nearly 10% of all Internet time, and the “Member Communities” category of sites surpassed the email category in Internet popularity, measured by time on site.
Measuring Success Of Social Media For Business
At Econsultancy today, Editor-in-chief Chris Lake is putting social media measurement into perspective:
The key with social media measurement, I think, is to stand back and take a widescreen approach to measurement.
Facebook Apps Get More Social with Chat
Facebook has launched the ability to let users chat within applications on Facebook. This keeps applications within the social network even more social.
If a developer uses the new fb:chat-invite FBML tag, they can display a list of users’ online friends and let them invite their friends to chat. Developers can also give users the freedom to choose which friends they want to appear in their chat lists within the apps.
Social Media Boosts Local Flavor
Once a month a small but growing troupe of modern beatniks gather at a dive bar in what has traditionally been considered (and still is in some circles) a rough part of downtown Lexington, Ky., for the Holler Poets Series, a live literary event focusing on local talent. Thanks to social media and the Internet, poetry is experiencing a bit of a resurgence in the collective artistic psyche, and the Holler Poets are no exception.
Crooks Continue Social Media Assault
There’s been a disturbing trend over the past few weeks showing that cyber-criminals are getting more adept at using popular social sites to ambush unsuspecting users. We’ve seen attacks targeted at Twitter, Facebook, Google’s Gmail, Gtalk, and even search. Today’s spotlight is on YouTube, a big part of the reason PandaLabs has seen a 400 percent spike in the infection rate of a specific kind of adware.
Twitter Used For Social Media Fundraising?
As some of you may know, I was recently involved in a tagline competition for The Printed Blog.
The prize for the winner was a Nintendo Wii. Despite being way behind after missing a day’s worth of voting, I ended up winning the contest, with over 51% of votes.
Advertisers and Developers Monetize Social Media Apps
Facebook has been encouraging developers to monetize their apps. They’ve recently gone so far as to create resources to help developers build business models around them.
One example of app monetization at work comes from the company Offerpal Media. This is a company that not only utilizes Facebook in its business model, but MySpace and other social networks as it enables both advertisers and developers to monetize apps.
B2B Buyers Engaged With Their Peers Through Social Media
A new report from Forrester Research, outlined by Groundswell, takes a look at how B2B buyers interact with social media—and by and large, they’re more engaged than their average peers.
The report breaks down the use of social media by Social Technographic role by type of social media involvement (types explained in this PPT):
Kid’s Brains Affected By Social Media
You may have thought that the headline should read “Social Media Changes Minds” because of all the wonderful things that social media adds to our lives (I’ll let you determine what wonderful things it does for you). But across the pond there’s concern that social media is actually changing the brains of young users.
The Social Networking Landscape in India and Europe
comScore released a couple of interesting reports today. The first involves the social networking landscape in Europe. According to comScore, France in particular had a big year when it comes to social networking, growing by 45% with Facebook as the leading network.