Online news has seen a sharp spike in the last year.  According to the Pew Research Center for People and the Press the percentage of people getting their news online jumped from 24 percent a year ago to 40 percent.  And in this same time period newspapers have been hovering around 35 percent.

If you’re after a younger audience the figures are even more startling: For those under 30 the internet now rivals television as a main source of national and international news. Nearly six-in-ten Americans in this age group  (59%) say they get most of their national and international news online and an identical percentage cites television.

This is also a huge change in the last year - in September 2007, twice as many young people said they relied mostly on television for news than mentioned the internet (68% vs. 34%).

If this makes you rethink your media relations strategy for 2009,  the PRoactive Report on News and Media Relations in the Internet Age would be a good read right about now.

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Connecting ideas and people - how talk can change our lives

by Valeria Maltoni

As retailers try and save the year with massive post Xmas discounts, a great chart from Good Magazine about who is buying what worldwide. Click on the image for a bigger version.

Source - Murketing (Delicious) and GOOD Magazine

1. Continued Growth of Social Networking Via Facebook Connect - right now, it’s a manual process to make Facebook work as authentication, but within 6 months, not only will it become much easier to implement Facebook Connect, fully - but the functions you’ll be able to add will multiply and by the end of 2009, many sites, including online newspapers, will build on Facebook Connect or a system like it.

Add Facebook Connect to Your Blog in 8 Minutes from Dave Morin on Vimeo.

However, due to the growth of Facebook Connect and Google’s Friendfeed (do I have the name right?)  Niche social networks will continue to fail identity management provide moves into the cloud and sites begin to offer more social networking services connected with Facebook - there by .

2.  Massive investment in the Information Super Highway as part of Obama’s Economic Stimulus package.  Recently I wrote a post on  Jobs of the Future - New Economy and who may be playing key roles in it - while a lot of emphasis was being put on rebuilding our highways and physical infrastructure - we’re actually far behind in out information and cellular infrastructure - speeding and broadening that up will also have to happen for the United States to compete in the Global Market. Thomas L. Friedman wrote a post on Time to Reboot America where Tom Friedman compared Hong Kong and the United States :

“….  If we’re so smart, why are other people living so much better than us? What has become of our infrastructure, which is so crucial to productivity? Back home, I was greeted by the news that General Motors was being bailed out — that’s the G.M. that Fortune magazine just noted “lost more than $72 billion in the past four years, and yet you can count on one hand the number of executives who have been reassigned or lost their job.”

My fellow Americans, we can’t continue in this mode of “Dumb as we wanna be.” We’ve indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we can’t afford, bailouts of auto companies that have become giant wealth-destruction machines, energy prices that do not encourage investment in 21st-century renewable power systems or efficient cars, public schools with no national standards to prevent illiterates from graduating and immigration policies that have our colleges educating the world’s best scientists and engineers and then, when these foreigners graduate, instead of stapling green cards to their diplomas, we order them to go home and start companies to compete against ours.

To top it off, we’ve fallen into a trend of diverting and rewarding the best of our collective I.Q. to people doing financial engineering rather than real engineering.”

There’s an indirect tie in to Social Media and Web Analytics - as money that goes into building IT Infrastructures is money that goes into increasing traffic flow that begs to be measured - and communications that, more and more, will be happening asynchronously.

Therefore, I predict that Economic Stimulus will be good for both Social Media and Web Analytics as it will indirectly support both.

3. Newspapers massively move to content creation and subcontract printing presses in 2009 and  Jeff Jarvis has written quite a lot about the future of Newspapers (who are rapidly dying) in posts like Can the LA Times turn off its presses?

Jeff Jarvis talked about the LA Times financial problems recently, but he might as well have been talking about the New York Times, Minneapolis Star Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle and a host of other major newspapers that are losing money rapidly -

“…. Clearly, by getting rid of print production and distribution, the LA Times not only gets rid of huge costs - which usually amount to at least half a newspaper’s budget - it also loses both circulation revenue and advertising revenue, which is much higher than digital revenue. As Westphal pointed out in our email exchange, some digital advertising is tied in bundles to print advertising and so the risk is that getting rid of print would hurt digital. But I suspect the opposite would happen: Some of that print advertising will now be forced online. Indeed, I’ve long argued that newspapers should force both readers and advertisers to online - to the future - and turning off the presses would do that.

There’s no question that the scale of the business would be smaller, much smaller. But with only edit and advertising sales costs (I’d market only during the transition) it could be a profitable business - a profitable digital journalistic business. That is the promised land. Welcome to the future.”

4. I agree with Charlene Li (see her Predictions for 2009) that Facebook’s SocialRank algorithms emerge to drive the open social web.  Right now, Facebook Connect is enabling me to post on TechCrunch using my Facebook Identity - that mean Facebook starts to know more and more about where I’m going and others who also comment on the same blogs and the same posts will be linked - suggesting that Friends will be recommended and asynchronous relationships formed, perhaps on the fly.  Here’s what Charlene wrote:

“… In much the same way that Google has PageRank to understand the relevancy of Web pages to your search, Facebook will debut a “SocialRank” algorithm which determines which of your friends are most relevant and important to the task at hand. Tapping the algorithm that already drives News Feed, Facebook will make SocialRank available on Facebook Platform applications and Friend Connect partners, drawing on the implicit data stream created in these other environments to prioritize the relationships that matter in that context. The result: Facebook will strike a significant advantage as the leader in the open social Web, thus “opening” up while maximizing the value of their proprietary network.”

5. Web Analytics is going to remain status-quo in 2009; meanwhile, Google Analytics will continue to gain ground while Omniture and Coremetrics stop growing marketshare.   Work is Web Analytics is as good as can be expected, given the economy - as talked about in Eric T. Peterson’s New data on the state of web analytics in 2009 where …..

“…. we conducted a poll on the call asking about planned 2009 investment in technology and human resources for web analytics, in part because of the amazing response to my post about Web Analyics being recession proof? For the 251 responses we got, here is what we heard:

Regarding investment in technology and tools:

• 36 percent said they planned to spend more in 2009 than they did in 2008
• 50 percent said they would be spending about the same in 2009 as they did in 2008
• Only 14 percent said  they would be spending less in 2009 than they did in 2008

Regarding staffing and resources for web analytics projects:

• 26 percent said they would be increasing staffing levels in 2009 compared to 2008
• 70 percent said staffing levels would stay about the same in 2009 as they were in 2008
• Only 4 percent said they would be decreasing staffing levels in 2009 compared to 2009 (phew!)

Finally, regarding web analytics in general in their organization:

• 47 percent said that senior management considers web analytics a priority investment
• 29 percent said that senior management considers web analytics a discretionary investment
• 24 percent said that senior management had poor visibility into their web analytics efforts

Now I’m a little suspicious of these numbers, especially the 47 percent saying that senior management considers web analytics a priority investment which sounds high to me by about half.  Keep in mind that there is clearly bias in this sample since respondents were DMA members with an expressed interest in web analytics …

If you believe these numbers it certainly sounds like 2009 will be somewhat stagnant in the industry compared to the last few years of rocket-like growth.

Perhaps “stagnant” is good, if you consider the alternatives.

6. Better Metrics for Social Media begin to emerge in 2009. There’s certainly a call for it among several leading authorities in Social Media today such as Joseph Jaffe, Todd Defren, Rohit Bhargava, Pete Blackshaw.

In fact, I know there will be movement here at the Web Analytics Association is working on Social Media Standards, drafts of which will be released in the Spring of 2009, from the latest information I have.

But I’d also like to point out here - that Social Media  committee - my co-chairs Jared Freedman and Elena Haliczer and I got the ball rolling in mid 2007 - though, of late, the Standards Committee is doing most of work. The WAA will yield it’s first drafts for comment in 2009 including Social Bookmarking, Streaming Media, Blogs, Widgets and a few other standards.

Here’s a video from 18 months ago of dinner with Gary Angel and I, after I had just been elected to Board of the Web Analytics Association.  It was Gary Angel’s suggestion that we focus the new committee on Social Media Standards - btw, ignore my cackling laugh in the video.

There’s also a video that Jim Sterne left for the Social Media committee - showing the WAA was working, through our committee - perhaps we were the very first group to formally start Social Media Standards in 2007 (see below).

To be sure, I was still basking in glow of just being elected to the Board of Directors in 2007 - as time has gone on, I’ve found, finding consensus for Social Media extremely difficult to focus, not only in Corporate America, but even in the WAA, itself - and much of that early “glow” has worn off and been replaced with a more “realistic” view of what can and will be accomplished in organizations, such as the WAA and IAB.

In the Social Media community - there’s been an expressed desire for Social Media Standards and 2009 we’ll see the first batch come out - how helpful they will be, remains to be seen.

7. Social Media will earn an established place in Corporate Life by end of 2009, much as Search and Web Analytics have, but it will come about through the backdoor of Search Engines - mostly due to Google’s introduction of SearchWiki late this year.

I wrote about liking the Google Search Wiki though some others, don’t and while there has been a bit of resistance - people are accepting Searchwiki as a fact of life -and Google is learning what they need to modify the search ranking alogrithym based on what the community of searchers for a particular keyword phase are using.

Also, at LeWeb 08 this year (I didn’t attend this year - but was at LeWeb 07 in Paris, last year) it was mentioned that Google may use the SearchWiki to change results where there are “strong signals” …. right now the search wiki results are not being used to influence wider search ut there is a possibility of us doing so - when we see really large signals, ie, a thousand people making the same deletion“.

Meanwhile Mike Grehan has been working on a new book on on New Signals to Search Engines which you can download here.  Among the things Mike says -that will be true in 2009- Collective Intelligence, the wisdom of your friends, will determine the search results.

While 2008 saw the emergence of SearchWiki and personalize search results - 2009 will accelerate that trend, and by the end of the year, what we call SEO will be largely superseded by social search and a host of new tools to collect information off the Social Web.

As so much Online Revenue is generated by Search Engines now, Social Search will, as a result, pave the way for Social Media to gain the same acceptance that Search and Web Analytics currently have.

This has been a long post - and in many ways, is incomplete.

In some ways, predicting 2009 ought to be easier than predicting the past couple of years - certain “facts” like the state of the Global Economy lead to inescapable conclusions on what is coming next.

However, on the other hand, we’re also so close the coming “next shift” or “Event Horizon” that we can’t enough distance to get a clear perspective on what’s coming next (because we’re right on top of it) - so in that sense, 2009 is harder to predict than previous years.

I think that at the end of 2009 what we call Web Analytics (today) and Social Media (today) might end up being called something else, another name, and perhaps, new organizations will evolve to take both disciplines, merge them and bring them into maturity.

“There are some people who use twitter as a distilled Livejournal. This is wrong.”

What’s encouraging is that the number of updates that say, in essence, “there is no wrong way to use Twitter” far outweigh those that support the idea.

Norm Lanier, aka @CraftyCoach, writes “Twitter is one of the web 2.0 sites that people on Etsy really recommend for promotion. The problem is most are doing it wrong - REALLY WRONG.”

He goes on to cite the “two for one” style promotions many Etsy sellers use on Twitter. (Etsy is like an eBay designed for crafts people. I buy a lot there.) Norm thinks most Etsy sellers are using Twitter wrong, and to confirm a lack of understanding of social media among these folks, scroll down Norm’s blog post and see among the comments a lengthy promotion of one seller’s Etsy store and products.

I agree that these kinds of updates are annoying, and possibly ineffective, and maybe it’s semantics, but is it truly “wrong”? How many annoying banners and pop-ups are we presented with in a typical day of web browsing? How many of the popular blogs we visit have cheesy advertising in the sidebar? It may be cheesy, but it’s not “wrong,” and some companies are making a lot of money using these techniques.

There’s another argument in opposition to “one-way” Twitter accounts. These are usually characterized by having a large number of followers and a small number of people the account is following in return, and are referred to as using “broadcast” mode.

The “broadcast” mode is often used by large corporations. It is generally, but not always, an automated RSS feed from the company’s blog or web site. (You can do this with twitterfeed.) There is nothing wrong with this! I subscribe to many “one-way” feeds, particularly from media outlets like The New York Times (16,465 followers, following 32), Harpers, Wired News, PBS**, etc. While it would be great to chat with these media giants, perhaps to tell the folks at PBS that I want more episodes of Antiques Roadshow that focus on Navajo blankets (I don’t really), this might not be the most efficient way for either of us to carry on this conversation.

The problem of calling certain uses of Twitter “wrong” is that you can only start to make such a case when you say, for example, “Twitter is a social network,” and then you apply the etiquette (rarely are there rules) of social networking. But it’s not a social network to everyone else, particularly the people who annoy you most with their perceived misuse of Twitter.

As many (including myself) have noted, what makes Twitter so powerful and useful is that it can be shaped by each user, personal or corporate, for a particular need. It can be:

• A social network
• Chat
• Instant messaging
• A “pointer” site
• A moderated news feed
• Whatever you want it to be
• Whatever I want it to be

It all reminds me of the old complaint that “there’s nothing but trash on TV.” I’m going to let you in on my secret way of dealing with this: I don’t follow anyone whose updates I don’t find useful.
In all my reading, I came across just one use of Twitter that I could agree was simply wrong:

TheHRLawyer: Now THIS is the WRONG way to use Twitter. Argh! http://tinyurl.com/69rdnj

The link goes to a story of how a reporter for Colorado’s Rocky Mountain News did a live Twitter “play-by-play” of the funeral of a three-year-old killed in a collision. Wrong. Definitely.

So just what is the absolute worst way to use Twitter? Signing up and building a list of followers so you can tell them how they are misusing Twitter.

* You may get proxy errors like I did. Keep trying.

** PBS also offers PBSEngage on Twitter, an account with “posts by real people” PBS has around a dozen Twitter accounts for various purposes

Tags: The New York Times, Harpers, Wired News, PBS, twitterfeed, Etsy, Norm Lanier, CraftyCoach

Random.org chose his comment as the winning number, so he’ll get a copy of Age of Conversation 2 - Why Don’t They Get It? autographed by both Connie Reece and me.

Thanks for playing!

A family catastrophy

It’s Christmas right now and I’m Jewish, so I figured I would have time to record a short two minute video for all of you.  I would like to wish you all a merry Christmas, happy Channukah and a pre - happy new year!  This week has been extremely difficult for me, as you might have seen on Facebook and Twitter.  Aside from my 90 year old grandfather being in rough shape, undergoing surgery and being moved to a nursing home, my grandmother and uncle got hit by a car.  They were both crossing this street and this middle-aged woman hit them.  She blamed the sunlight!  Can you believe that?  My grandmother (88 years old) ended up with a broken pelvis and is in extraordinary pain and my uncle was fine because he jumped onto of the car upon impact.  The really sad thing is that my grandparents are in two different places and don’t get to see each other.

Thanks to everyone who has expressed concern.  I appreciate it!

3 mandatory tasks for your brand

1.  Set achievable goals

Between now and January 1st, please sit down for an hour or two and write down some short and long-term goals for 2009.  You should do this every year.  The short-term goals could be monthly or quarterly and your long-term goal should cover the entire year.  This time next year, you should have check marks next to all of your goals as a sign of completion.  Depending on your current status or place in you career, some goals will be attainable and others will not be.  I recommend that you work with the ones you know you can pull off an work like hell to reach them.

2.  Remain focused

A lot of people are getting laid off around you.  You might have had a close friend or family member that is looking for a new job now.  Do not lose focus, even if you have setbacks, uncertainty and depression around you.  In 2009, you must concentrate on building as much personal brand equity as possible, in order to position yourself when our economic climate changes.  Also, if you lose focus, you might end up without a job.  Be confident!

3.  Network constantly

I’ve always said that any new opportunity can change your life.  Well, people lead to opportunities, meaning that any new person you meet can change your life for the better.  I don’t go to sleep until I’ve met five new people.  In 2009, this will double.  If you aren’t on social networks or aren’t going to network events, you need to start ASAP.  Also, start thinking about whose already in your current network.  Your family, friends, teachers, classmates and coworkers can help as well.  They all have networks already accounted for and, with permission, you can tap them.

Harold Pinter, Nobel Laureate who once spoke of death as “crafty” put it this way:

“But death permits you
To arrange your hours

While he sucks the honey
From your lovely flowers.”

• freedom of religion, [Section 116]
  
• trial by jury, [Section 80]
  
• freedom from discrimination against out-of-State residents, [Section 117]
  
• and a right to acquisition of property on just terms. [Paragraph 51(xxxi)]
  

When I wrote this piece last year, as we completed a year, I had mentioned that"Sometimes a seed doesn't need more water to become a sapling, it needs more time! One look around will tell you that social media has taken off, it's mainstream. Our Scenario/ Blogworks seed too has now taken root, and is growing nicely. 2009 is our year of growth - more about this in a bit but first a look at how 2008 has been so far:

We were sitting around my desk day-before, for a discussion on the year ahead and one of the things we reviewed was our objectives, as I had first coined sometime in October 2006, sitting alone at Lodhi Gardens.

Objective

1. We aim to be the most respected name in Conversational Marketing in the country, offering strategic solutions and know-how to brands & corporates.

   - Our consulting practice will deliver best-in-class, unique and measurable programmes by constantly innovating and combining this with a process oriented approach.

   - We will operate a range of innovative Web 2.0 communities, forums and platforms. We are clearly focused on creating a set of focused properties that would engage stakeholders we understand, in ways that simplifies processes; adds value to each stakeholder and profits us too.
   

I am not a great believer in 1st mover advantage and have come to believe that it's a comforting illusion that defocuses you from rigour and innovation that keep you ahead. Instead, we believe that "It is our culture of participation and constant innovation, combined with the focus on a disciplined approach that helps us deliver strategic solutions and measurable results for our clients."

1. It was evolution for us when, preparing for the next round of differentiation, we changed our promise to "Strategic Social Media Solutions" in March 2008. The needle had moved, marketers & corporates had begun to understand the need to engage stakeholders in conversations. As one of the first to enter the space, we too had contributed to this change in our small way, by sharing know-how and learnings. However, we believe, as social media gains mainstream adoption, strategic interventions are the only way brands, corporates and media companies - our key customer groups on the consulting side - could stand out and strategic solutions is our mainstay.

   Our work with clients allowed us to learn every moment as we created touch points, engaged, listened, identified evangelists, co-created with customers, learned that conversational marketing is not about online, it's about conversations.The journey continues & real work is our textbook.

2. Since our endeavor has always been to seed an institution, a natural step forward was to institutionalize the business. May 2008 we became Scenario Consulting Private Limited with Blogworks (and now Pitchh.com) as business divisions.

3. We had plans to launch a couple of focused communities right from the time we started, but as would often happen with a self-funded business, you need to prioritize .

   In July 2008 however, Pitchh.com, our first community initiative, was born out of a simple, but powerful, insight that both Brands and 'Agencies' could do with a platform that allows them to 'make the right connect' quickly and effectively.

   The process today, as both sides know, is not just time consuming also cumbersome. Brands often struggle to find the 'right' partner - for their 'specific' need and fit. Similarly for Agencies, it's quite a task to keep track of pitch requests doing rounds. Pitchh bridges that crucial gap.

   We have used the last few months to run test cases, bring about changes based on feedback. New features and enhancements are on the way. On the other hand, a slowdown in global economy has meant that fewer new pitches are being invited by clients; on the other hand though agencies are now more open to such platforms even more than they were. We are just about starting our outreach...watch out for more action around Pitchh.

4. With 422 started surveys & nearly 200 completed surveys as I write this post, the India Social Media Survey, Brands & Corporates, Edition 1 that Exchange4Media and Blogworks is clearly a nice-nice way to close the year. The insights that I have peeped into ;) are fantastic - this is the real stuff, this is what’s really happening on the ground.

   Honestly, I can't think of a better team to have put this together :)
   

Powered with a fantastic team, great clients, countless friends, powerful insights, a warm office, this is just the beginning and the year ahead promises more success and joy.

Agenda 2009'

1. Expansion at Blogworks: We have the mind-space of stakeholders, credibility based on client work and referrals. This is our year to grow: offices in Bombay, Bangalore and a bigger team in Delhi, with office spaces to match.
2. Grow the research offering at Blogworks: We only took this live last week, even though we have done a lot of work all through 2008.
3. Pitchh.com: Global adoption is our mandate, this year we take our steps in that direction.
4. Launch of another web 2.0 offering: This one is a content offering. We think we have found a cozy niche and would try and launch first quarter.

Any more and we'd have given too much away :).

Simply put:

Our Mission remains'

1. To facilitate transparent communication and conversations between organizations and their stakeholders.

   With congratulations pouring in on Twitter, Facebook, G Talk..there is no place I'd - team raises hands and says 'We'd' in synchrony :) - that we'd rather be.

   All this wouldn't be possible without each of yours support. Thanks MUCHOS!

   Keep sending your good wishes.

   Here is to success & joy. Amen.

   
   

Image via Wikipedia

Integrating the “social” good into our “social” media discussions.

Fifty-plus ways to give to charities this holiday, a list provided by  Qui Diaz in a recent guest blog post for Mashable. The blogs readership is mostly tech and social media focused, so the list focuses on nonprofits that are making good use of the social Web to connect with their stakeholders. This is a great example of integrating the social good into our social media discussion. We can multiply our individual efforts by telling others.

DIGITAL CHARITY TOOLBOX: 50+ Ways to Get Your “Give” On

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A new study by MS&L, conducted in partnership with GfK Roper, examines some of the corporate values consumers find most important today, and the effects of such perceptions on maintaining long-term business, reports Brandweek.

The study polled 6,000 consumers worldwide in the U.S., U.K., France, Italy, Sweden and China on topics such as “what defines a leading company?” and how blogs, the Internet and the media influenced their perception of a company’s values.

While the report covers many aspects that influence a company’s perceived values, one key finding is that more  than half (59 percent)  of Americans believe they can judge a company’s values by its online presence (versus 45 percent in the U.K.)

Another interesting finding is that while price and quality may be the primary purchase influencers in tough times, in the long run, it’s values that matter the most.

If your online presence is not yet part of your PR plan for 2009 this report should nudge you in that direction. Now is the time to figure out how to make the most of online tools that can keep you close to your customers

“The findings underscore the need for marketers to shift their business focus from being “driven by a coherent set of core values” to one that emphasizes how those “values [can] be communicated effectively at every touch point or companies risk undermining both their relationships with their customers and their long-term success,” said Mark Hass, CEO of MS&L Worldwide.

That places it squarely in the PR arena. And if more than half of them judge you by your online presence, it’s time to make that a PR priority.

The Bulldog/PR University’s Social Media Bootcamp will be taking an in depth look at how to use social tools to enhance your online presence.

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Today Shiv Singh and Garrick Schmitt announced that Razorfish filed a patent to measure social media distribution. The patent, which is marketed as a way to measure social influence, is really more about providing metrics for how social media content/widgets/applications virally distribute.

So what problem is this patent trying to solve?

How do marketers identify the key influencers within a social network, and how do you really track and understand how social behavior works?

Let's use a widget as an example (that has an embed code in it so that a viewer can embed the widget again without visiting the source website). You've seen widgets like this before.

Your typical video widget

The problem is current systems and tracking methods usually only measure breath of widget influence I.e. How many people are out their using the widget. Currently measurement methods do not account for the viral distribution path that a widget takes (which is essentially a graph).

I am going to present a use case to make this easy to understand.

Person A places a widget (a video in this case) on their website "example1.com". Person B visits "example1.com" and views the video. Person B would like to feature it on their own website. They snag the embed code and drop it on "example2.com" (Thus making this the second 'skip' or 'generation' from the domain "example1.com"). The chart below illustrates how this continues to flow throughout a social network ad nauseum. I assume, that this data will be collected and analyzed in some central location.

You can see above that the Action Tag Solution records a generation history for EACH source of a widget. Doing so allows Razorfish (and by extension, their clients) to identify key influencers within a social network AND how viral a widget is for a particular generation from a given source. In the diagram above, Person B and Person D have the most influence. In the future, targeting these influential websites with marketing spend will increase the probability that a widget will go viral and the effectiveness of that spend.

I have chosen to use a widget as an example, but the Action Tag Solution could be used for any media type, widget, application, etc. E.g. For a facebook application, replace 'widget' with 'application' and 'website' with 'user' in the illustration above.

I am very excited to see what type of measurement dashboards and reporting tools Razorfish (or others) will create to visualize this information.

Read more about the Action Tag Solution on Shiv's goingsocialnow.com or on Razorfish's Digital Design blog

 Jordan Willms on Web Strategy, Social Media, Business and Technology

HubSpot, the people behind TwitterGrader (that tool that gives you a Twitter 'score' based on followers and posts), has come out with a fairly comprehensive report on Twitter.

A few highlights:

• The overall size of the community is between 4-5 million, with (in view of the amount of airtime Twitter has had over the past year) 70% of accounts having been created over the past year

• HubSpot reckons 30%+ of accounts are inactive

• Twitter is growing at around 5-10k a day, with traffic having grown by 600%+ over the past twelve months

• The average number of followers is around 70

A PDF of the report is available here.

A few comments from other blogs:

Greg Verdino says that some of the stats remind him of Second Life in 2007, when a lot of noise around the virtual world caused a ton of people to check it out, and promptly leave again.

Indeed, just like Second Life, Twitter isn't always straight-forward to get to grips with, and based on just my own personal experience of people who have signed up but lost interest, I'd say the 30% stat is if anything an underestimate.

Fortunately, even a churn rate of 50% (which is what I've personally seen from people I know) is far better than Second Life's rate of 80-90% who take a look and never come back again.

Media Post runs with the headline "Report reveals Twitter is mostly hype" linking back to Marshall Kirkpatrick's analysis on ReadWriteWeb that says Twitter would take 36 years to catch Facebook, if Facebook stopped growing today.

Talking about a Twitter bubble is a nice line to take but for me, running a Twitter vs Facebook numbers game is a little spurious.

It's a bit like if someone had - to use the example here in the UK of the tabloid newspaper The Sun, and the broadsheet The Guardian - made a pronouncement on the Sun kicking the Guardian's backside due to its circulation numbers being 15x higher.

Though they are newspapers, they are of course very different in both readership and style and you are not comparing like with like. And so it is with Twitter. It might "only" have 4-5 million users, but it's influence is disportionate to the numbers. As Marshall Kirkpatrick says, Facebook has 30x more users than Twitter, but only 4x as much media share of voice.

Just like a more high brow broadsheet newspaper, Twitter's low user number base by comparison to Facebook, masks the fact that it's packed full of social media influencer types who use the network on a regular basis.

And that, unlike Facebook, it's been used to shape real-time events and been faster than the traditional news. For example with the recent plane crash in Denver, and the terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

As a result, predictions of a Second Life style bubble seem a little over blown. Twitter will never become 'the next Facebook', but it's already made an enormous impact and if anything will become anything more mainstream.

Image - Telex