ComScore released last month results over an interesting study to identify the “Top 20 Highest Engagement Social Networking Country Audiences“.  With 6.6 hours and 1307 pages per visitor per month, it was surprising that Russia has the most engaged audience, followed by Brazil and Canada.   Mexico is ranked #11, with 4 hours and 488 pages per visitor per month.

Read the Press Release.

Juan, a friend from Avatar, sent me this file, which was developed by Espresso.  Great introduction to Social Media for those companies wanting to start a conversation.

Unlocking the awesome potential of behavioral disorders…

Get you T-Shirt @ Despair

I recently read a post from Drew Kerr at PR Rock and Roll in which he said that for college students the entire world of online networking is Facebook; and I think that college students might no be the only ones with that belief, a lot of companies out there might be thinking the same way. Despite that we already know about the top 25 social networks, we might be far from knowing every single one in detail.  It sounds even impossible to achieve that as almost everyday a new social network is created, in fact, most recent versions of CMS solutions include modules for building social networks.

For a brand, it might be desired to maintain a strong online presence across the net, or as Brian Solis calls, the Conversation Prism.  On his post, Brian presents KnowEm, an online service that not only checks the availability of your username on over 120 popular social networks, but, if you’re too busy, can help you registering on all of them (a paid service that will take between 1 and 5 business days).

Anyway, if you’re just curious about the 120 popular social networks, visit KnowEm and meet them all.

Today, almost every company trying to increase its online presence wants to be part of the conversation. Most of them ask their agencies to develop strategies to “use” social media as part of their online marketing campaigns.  Starting from here, the approach is wrong.  As said previously, companies must not try to join the conversation, they must CREATE the conversation; and using social media must not be considered as part of the advertising activities.  Until you don’t get that, you won’t be successful with social media.

It is clear that you, as a Marketing head of a company, might not necessarily know all about the Social Media stuff, and thus want hire a Social Media Expert to do the job.  Jason has just published at MarketingHackz his selection of the 5 things your social media expert should know:

1. How to pitch bloggers: “Pitching bloggers requires more of a relationship than anything else”
2. How to monitor social media campaigns: “Monitoring social media campaigns isn’t like loading up Google Analytics”
3. Strong personal profiles: “If your expert doesn’t have a strong presence online, they aren’t going to get the job done for you either”
   ….

Want to know the rest?  Click here.

Digital Inspiration posted about a set of 900+ interviews that Michael Stelzner did to Internet Marketers to find out how marketers are using social media to grow their businesses.  On the report, he also found the top 10 social media questions marketers want answered, including what social media tools are most popular, how they are using social media, what are the benefits of using social media, etc.

The results are interesting. Regarding the most popular social media tools: Twitter, Blogs and LinkedIn and Facebook are the favorites.

As for the benefits of using social media, marketers answered the following:

If you are planning to jump into the social media, you might want to take a look at the full report.  Here.

So you are one of the thousands of companies out there that want to become Social but don’t have a clue?

This is what you have to do:

1. Quit trying to “join the conversation”

Read the next steps here.

Here are two interesting slideshows regarding the use of Twitter for Business.

And…

Via

A lot has been said about how to incorporate social media to the business.  Some companies had taken the path of creating profiles for their brands and products as if they were real people and start interacting with others.

On the other hand there are real executives from companies that had just jumped into the social media to start a face-to-face real conversation with consumers. 

Springwise brings us another example: A restaurant that has incorporated Twitter to its business model.

Kogi Korean BBQ takes the taste of Korean barbecue and melds it with the portability of Mexican tacos and burritos. The company sells its food primarily through two trucks that are always on the go to new locations in the Los Angeles area—to know where to find them, customers must follow Kogi on Twitter (and more than 7,000 already do).

More on Springwise.

or the truth about Twitter… hilarious.

Last month Compete published a re-arranged list of the top 25 social networks:

As expected, Facebook finally over passed Myspace. On the other hand, Twitter is quickly going up, last year it was at position 22 and today is at 3!

It is also interesting to see the details on the time spent by users. Last month Facebook users spent 16.41 minutes in average per visit, while Myspace and Twitter users spent around 9 minutes.

More info at Compete.

Skittles has recently redesigned its webpage and btw amazed the whole online marketing industry with the new Skittles homepage, which is based entirely on content published on Social Media.

Yes, if you want to know more about the products, within the Skittles website you are sent to a Wikipedia article, if you want to see photos, then you are directed to a Flickr profile.

What about friends? Facebook. Videos? YouTube. And chatting? Twitter.

You’ve got to check it out to understand the concept. It is also good to read the interesting analysis from ViralBlog.

I just saw an interesting diagram posted by Todd Defren at PR-squared that shows the evolution of advertising vs. public relations in this Social Media era.

“As you can see, PR is becoming increasingly interpersonal: there is a daily flow of interaction, responsiveness and adaptation going on amongst PR people and their ever-expanding publics. [...] Meanwhile, the advertising folks are coming to embrace more and more user-generated content, but as PAID media (versus EARNED media).

Advertising’s intrinsic, long-term value to the corporate brand is declining in the Social Media era. And the PR industry is the happy beneficiary.”

The diagram is really insightful and yes, I agree with Todd, but the counterpart of this is that nowadays in Latin America (for example), there are no agencies that can advice corporations on a complete Digital PR strategy.

Of course, you will find the traditional PR agencies that will offer some kind of “exercises” on the digital world, like including the posting of a video on YouTube or creating a “fan group” or a profile of your product at Facebook. On the other hand you will find also Online Marketing agencies that will offer the inclusion of  “social” into the online marketing campaign… all good ideas but, all of those are just tactics…what about the REAL strategy?

Companies must first be clear on what they want to achieve when they are going online, nevertheless if the effort is conducted by marketing or PR, and this is a great opportunity for agencies to make interesting proposals.  Companies need answers to questions like: What is the best approach FOR US to go online?,  Are we prepared to make a conversation?,  Do we really want to make a conversation?,  What we need?,  How is the roadmap-to-digitalPR or digitalMKT traced?

All of those tough, but really necessary questions to be answered prior to jumping online…  What do you think?

The Times of London asked experts about the Twitter phenomenom and they concluded that we Twitter to reassure ourselves that we are alive. People use the Internet message-broadcasting service to send 140-character “tweets” relating their most mundane activities because of an underdeveloped sense of the self.

What do you think about it? Read the full article at ValleyWag

A great example of good use of dinamic text to deliver a message…

Via pjorge.com