Interesting website that analyses how well companies are succeeding with social media campaigns. One of their most recent articles from www.techeyetimes.com is about how The Times has lost over 50% of traffic since moving to paid online content. For more info about hitwise go to http://www.hitwise.com/uk/

If anyone is still interested just come across another article, an interview with Julian Assange, who apparently came out of hiding on Monday.

Julian Assange, who the feds fear may publish State Dept. secrets, talked to Philip Shenon about his outreach to Washington, his fear of criminal charges—and why Bradley Manning is a “national hero.”

The elusive founder of WikiLeaks came out of hiding in Europe Monday.

Julian Assange told The Daily Beast in an interview that while he will remain outside the U.S. indefinitely, his lawyers have opened a line of communication in Washington with the Obama administration in recent days about the website’s plans to release a leaked Pentagon video of the “carnage” of an American airstrike in Afghanistan last year.

The lawyers reached out, Assange said, in the wake of statements from American officials and news reports that the U.S. was desperate to track him down and prevent WikiLeaks from posting the video and other classified material reportedly leaked to the site by a 22-year-old American intelligence analyst now in custody in Kuwait.

“The law can be used in a number of ways if there is the political will to,” Assange said. “There is a history of abusing the legal process.”

Assange said that, whatever the public expressions of outrage in Washington about the leaks, the Obama administration had so far not attempted in any formal way to block WikiLeaks from posting additional classified material. The State Department and Pentagon raised no formal protest to site’s lawyers, he said. Nor has there been any formal threat that he faces arrest.

For more info go to:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-06-21/wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-speaks-his-outreach-to-the-pentagon/?cid=hp:mainpromo8

Found this a few years ago and seem to use it everyday. http://popurls.com/

great for random / popular / intriguing news. Worth a look.

Read a really interesting article in the New Yorker a few weeks ago about WikiLeaks and how they operate. Seems like this kind of thing could be a outlet for future journalism. No fixed location, depending on leaks from companies and promoting total freedom of information, no matter how controversial. Check it out:

The house on Grettisgata Street, in Reykjavik, is a century old, small and white, situated just a few streets from the North Atlantic. The shifting northerly winds can suddenly bring ice and snow to the city, even in springtime, and when they do a certain kind of silence sets in. This was the case on the morning of March 30th, when a tall Australian man named Julian Paul Assange, with gray eyes and a mop of silver-white hair, arrived to rent the place. Assange was dressed in a gray full-body snowsuit, and he had with him a small entourage. “We are journalists,” he told the owner of the house. Eyjafjallajökull had recently begun erupting, and he said, “We’re here to write about the volcano.” After the owner left, Assange quickly closed the drapes, and he made sure that they stayed closed, day and night. The house, as far as he was concerned, would now serve as a war room; people called it the Bunker. Half a dozen computers were set up in a starkly decorated, white-walled living space. Icelandic activists arrived, and they began to work, more or less at Assange’s direction, around the clock. Their focus was Project B—Assange’s code name for a thirty-eight-minute video taken from the cockpit of an Apache military helicopter in Iraq in 2007. The video depicted American soldiers killing at least eighteen people, including two Reuters journalists; it later became the subject of widespread controversy, but at this early stage it was still a closely guarded military secret

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian#ixzz0rbUaPWb

Digging deeper in social interactions, Twitter is testing (and thus expected) to launch a new “You both follow” feature. So far, it looks pretty similar to Facebook’s “Friends in common”.

Thanks to mashable.com

That means that the feature will enable you to see who you and a given account are both following. All in all, a pretty simple, unintrusive and clever addition to the service.

Econsultancy has put together a snapshot of some of the statistics floating around about social media usage and compared it to six months ago.

Regardless of all the bookmarking tools there are around, I’m always losing track of figures like this when I need them so I thought I’d whack them on here and I’ll always be able to find them - maybe you’ll find them useful too.

• Facebook claims that 50% of active users log into the site each day. This would mean at least 175m users every 24 hours… A considerable increase from the previous 120m.
• Twitter now has 75m user accounts, but only around 15m are active users on a regular basis. It’s still a fair increase from the estimated 6-10m global users from a few months ago.
• LinkedIn has over 50m members worldwide. This means an increase of around 1m members month-on-month since July/August last year.
• Facebook currently has in excess of 350 million active users on global basis. Six months ago, this was 250m… meaning around a 40% increase of users in less than half a year.
• Flickr now hosts more than 4bn images. A massive jump from the previous 3.6bn I wrote about
• More than 35m Facebook users update their status each day. This is 5m more than towards the end of July, 2009.
• Wikipedia currently has in excess of 14m articles, meaning that it’s 85,000 contributors have written nearly a million new posts in six months.
• Photo uploads to Facebook have increased by more than 100%. Currently, there are around 2.5bn uploads to the site each month – this was around a billion last time I covered this.
• There are more than 70 translations available on Facebook. Last time around, this was only 50.
• Back in 2009, the average user had 120 friends within Facebook. This is now around 130.
• Mobile is even bigger than before for Facebook, with more than 65m users accessing the site through mobile-based devices. In six months, this is over 100% increase. (Previously 30m). As before, it’s no secret that users who access Facebook through mobile devices are almost 50% more active than those who don’t.Okay, so now some new stuff that’s worth considering when looking at social media marketing that I’ve not included in previous posts:
• There are more than 3.5bn pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, etc.) shared each week on Facebook.
• There are now 11m LinkedIn users across Europe.
• Towards the end of last year, the average number of tweets per day was over 27.3 million.
• The average number of tweets per hour was around 1.3m.
• More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook.
• Purpose-built Facebook pages have created more than 5.3bn fans.
• 15% of bloggers spend 10 or more hours each week blogging, according to Technorati’s new State of the Blogosphere.
• At the current rate, Twitter will process almost 10bn tweets in a single year.
• About 70% of Facebook users are outside the USA.
• India is currently the fastest-growing country to use LinkedIn, with around 3m total users.
• More than 250 Facebook applications have over a million combined users each month.
• 70% of bloggers are organically talking about brands on their blog.
• 38% of bloggers post brand or product reviews.
• More than 80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since December 2008 and more than 60m Facebook users engage with it across these external sites each month.

Something else interesting came out this week from Neilson (reported on Mumbrella) that showed Australians are the most prolific users of social media in the world. Apparently we here down under spend on average nearly 7 hours a month on social networking sites compared to the UK and the US at just over 6 hours.

There’s one more interesting figure I came across today and that is the growth of Facebook users in Oz - according to Facebook’s advertising information, there are nearly 8 million Facebook users in Australia (see full details on Laurel Papworth’s post here).

And if that isn’t enough stats for you for one day, check out this very extensive (and seemingly real-time) overview of Facebook usage worldwide at CheckFacebook.com.

Over the last few hours we’ve seen the newish Twitter lists feature disabled and vanish from our screens only to return again apparently completely back to normal. It caused ‘Twitter Lists’ quickly became a high trending topic and quite a lot of concern for many.

During the outage I spent some time meeting with Brenton Cannizzaro from an amazing digital agency in Adelaide, enpresiv, which came about entirely from a Twitter connection and my inclusion on one of his lists. Whilst I’ve now got his business card and therefore his personal details, prior to that, the only place I had stored his details were on Twitter - if they vanished, so too would Brenton from my database.

All is obviously good now with Twitter Lists and it was only a tiny window of downtime but, it got me thinking about what would happen if:

a) Twitter lists never came back

or

b) Lists returned but some of the people on it had been deleted or altered in some way

All that hard work categorising your friends on Twitter, creating a list that had just totally vanished and there’d be little you could do about it because you don’t have any control over Twitter.

It also reminded me I’d promised to post some highlights from Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith so this first one fits perfectly:

The authors talk about the importance of social networks and working at connecting with people on the web as a means of increasing opportunities for you / your business / organisation.

You Live or Die by Your Database

This section discusses your own personal database of connections, the representation of your personal network in a searchable form. Even if you’re a cog in a corporate machine, if you’re not in the business of building your own database of contacts, then you have to start. Now.

…one’s personal database was an asset as valuable as gold, if nurtured and maintained.

However, they stress it is important to maintain your own database away from online platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

Why?

Because you can never fully trust that your database online will be accessible, that your account will stay up, and that your data or account won’t become corrupt.

To us, storing a local copy ensures that you control the database at all times. If, as we say, you live or die by your database why would you trust a third party with its ultimate intergity.

So, the short lived AWOL Twitter Lists are back but what would happen if your LinkedIn contacts vanished? If you’d like to start your own personal database, here are some tips from the book that might help you get you started:

What should go into a personal database?

• First name
• Last name
• Title
• Company
• Email
• Phone number (preferably cell phone)
• URL
• State/Province where you reside
• Notes

Written by Sarah Thomas, Managing Director, Carve Consulting (Australia)

Here are my picks of the best reads last week about things you should consider if you are responsible for your brand’s reputation online.

Please note: A big hat tip to Gavin Heaton (or @servantofchaos) who provided the insipration for this post. His weekly “5 must read posts from last week” are great reading which is probably why, totally unwittingly when I posted this last night I managed to completely (almost) plagiarise his blog post title - funnily enough, that being the topic one of the must-read posts he links to on an earlier list.

1. How brands should manage their reputation online

Some of the biggest names in social media gathered together at Blogworld expo last week. This post covers highlights from one of the panel sessions including some level headed advice from Amber Nasland at monitoring specialists, Radian6 such as “social media didn’t invent criticism” and that organisations should have emergency plans in place (Vegemite’s iSnack 2.0 leaps to my mind here).

2. The Top 10 free tools for monitoring your brand’s reputation

One of the most important things to do if you are responsible for your brand’s reputation online is to know what people are saying about you and this article reviews some of the easily accessible, free tools to listen to online conversations.

We must remember that conversations are being held on the web with or without our consent. That means we can choose whether to be observers, participants or outcasts

3. Top 5 Twitter Trends to watch right now

Once you start monitoring conversations going on about you / your brand / your organisation you’ll realise quickly that many of these are taking place on Twitter.

Here’s a great article that includes insights about Twitter trends from blogger, author and entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki as well as PR2.0 guru Brian Solis.5.

4. Managing your reputation through search results

This post from the Google blog has some tips on what to do when you aren’t that happy with what you find when you type your company’s name into Google. These include thinking twice before you publishing anything online and if there’s something you don’t like - contact the source of the information (and there are some tips on how to do this) as well as proactively publishing positive information.

5. Damage Control: Social Media Reversals

Renowned web strategist Jeremiah Owyang identifies and analayses three case studies in this post looking at how organisations should respond to a social media crisis: “assert themselves and be proactive - even during a crises”.

Brian Solis on his PR2.0 blog has collated and published this amazing list of the top 100 ways you can use Twitter.

Twitter Client Market Share

1. Web,40.945%
2. API,11.6418% (custom applications, scripts or bots)
3. TweetDeck,6.635%
4. UberTwitter,4.288%
5. twitterfeed,3.9538%
6. txt,3.9254%
7. mobile web,3.567%
8. TwitterFon,2.4622%
9. Tweetie,2.1434%
10. TwitterFox,1.3588%
11. Echofon,1.3356%
12. Twitterrific,1.2322%
13. twidroid,0.886%
14. twhirl,0.8756%
15. movatwitter,0.8398%
16. TwitterBerry,0.835%
17. TwitPic,0.7806%
18. Seesmic,0.5524%
19. Tween,0.5414%
20. HootSuite,0.5258%
21. Power Twitter,0.3556%
22. Twit,0.3358%
23. gmedtwitpost,0.3188%
24. Snaptu,0.3018%
25. Twittelator,0.3%
26. POLLpigeon,0.2868%
27. FriendFeed,0.275%
28. P3:PeraPeraPrv,0.229%
29. DestroyTwitter,0.2188%
30. Perl Net::Twitter,0.2154%
31. Ping.fm,0.2128%
32. LOL quiz,0.1792%
33. TwitterGadget,0.1758%
34. Facebook,0.1722%
35. Twitter Tools,0.1558%
36. Tumblr,0.144%
37. RSS2Twitter,0.1412%
38. Sidekick,0.1386%
39. twitRobot,0.1338%
40. Google,0.1326%
41. dabr,0.1304%
42. CoTweet,0.129%
43. Blip.fm,0.1276%
44. Fun140,0.1274%
45. Gravity,0.1264%
46. SocialScope,0.1116%
47. Tweed,0.1074%
48. YoruFukurou,0.1064%
49. Mobile Tweete,0.106%
50. BlogTalkRadio,0.106%
51. WP to Twitter,0.1058%
52. bit.ly,0.0962%
53. iTweet,0.0914%
54. PockeTwit,0.091%
55. Tweetbots,0.0902%
56. PhotoShare,0.0862%
57. TwitterRide,0.0854%
58. NatsuLiphone,0.0794%
59. Mobster World,0.0784%
60. SimplyTweet,0.0672%
61. TinyTwitter,0.0664%
62. Digsby,0.0642%
63. Twitter4J,0.0614%
64. Reuters.com,0.0608%
65. Ustream,0.0606%
66. Tweets60,0.0584%
67. Movatter,0.0572%
68. MySpace,0.0568%
69. twibble,0.0562%
70. TwitZap,0.0526%
71. Twitter4R,0.0518%
72. Twaitter,0.0484%
73. Twitterizer,0.048%
74. Nambu,0.0464%
75. TwitterBar,0.0426%
76. Twikini,0.0412%
77. Epic Pet Wars,0.0386%
78. Twitme for WordPress,0.0368%
79. Photomemo,0.0356%
80. Mixero,0.0356%
81. yoono,0.0332%
82. Netvibes,0.0328%
83. TwitBin,0.0326%
84. Flock,0.0316%
85. Twidget,0.0312%
86. Spaz,0.031%
87. WordTwit,0.0308%
88. Twitterena,0.0304%
89. Post to Twitter,0.0298%
90. 140 Mafia,0.0298%
91. TweetSG,0.0292%
92. Fantasy Sports,0.0292%
93. Gwibber,0.0276%
94. TwiXtreme,0.0276%
95. Posterous,0.0274%
96. m.slandr.net,0.0272%
97. TwitKit,0.0264%
98. Twitter Opera widget,0.0264%
99. Tweet-U-Later,0.0264%
100. Twibbon,0.026%
101. Splitweet,0.026%
102. schuelerVZ,0.026%
103. ShareThis.com,0.0258%
104. TwitterMail,0.0256%
105. twittai,0.0252%
106. Identica,0.0236%
107. Adium,0.0228%
108. Brightkite,0.0224%
109. モバツイッター,0.0224%
110. Stickam,0.0218%
111. HTC Peep,0.0218%
112. BeTwittered,0.021%
113. TweetLeads,0.021%
114. Adjix,0.0208%
115. Twitstat Mobile,0.02%
116. TwitterIrcGateway,0.0198%
117. Viigo,0.0188%
118. EventBox,0.0186%
119. TweetGenius,0.0184%
120. twitthat,0.0184%
121. blu,0.017%
122. TwInbox,0.0168%
123. Matt,0.0166%
124. TweetPhoto,0.0166%
125. buzztap,0.0166%
126. TweetGrid,0.016%
127. Bird Feeder,0.0158%
128. JTwitter,0.0158%
129. LiveTweeter,0.0156%
130. TwitThis,0.0152%
131. TypePad,0.0152%
132. Spymaster,0.0152%
133. Flickr,0.0152%

Mind boggling really isn’t it? (More on that later…)

And what is the best one? Is it simply the one used by the most people? Obviously it depends on for what purpose you are using it for, those just keeping in touch with friends will have far different requirements than those actively monitoring their brand’s reputation.

However, I’d be interested to know if you have a favourite Twitter application you use all the time?

My personal experience is that I swap and change all the time between a few different applications, but having said that I’m not surprised really…. as a total aside (read: stop reading here if you are just interested in the Twitter story), someone asked me the other day which arm I put first into the armhole when putting on a jacket - apparently it has something to do with which side of your brain is dominant and makes a huge difference if you ever have a stroke - and, I realised I use both…but I’m still not sure what that means if I do have a stroke? Best not to think about that…

But it does reminds me of a really interesting little test we posted ages ago which determines which side of your brain you think with: Creative or Practical - here’s the link to the old post - have a go it is pretty cool. And yes, in case you were wondering she turns a different way everytime I look at her…now my mind is truly boggled.

Sometimes I forget that a lot of tools we’re aware of aren’t necessarily known to everyone, so I will try and make a point of remembering to post them up here.

Case in point was in Prague yesterday when I did a quick ‘Twitter sentiment snapshot’ of Virgin Atlantic using http://twitrratr.com/ on the big screen. As I turned round I noticed that everyone was taking note of the URL, so, well here it is.  The grab below is a snapshot of sentiment around Brizzly, the Twitter tool of the moment we’re using @ Carve.

Twitrratr is pretty simplistic but a fun / instant / free way of checking out the view of the Twitterati. Give it a go