Ad-ology published Small Business Marketing Forecast 2010. This report identifies benefits of engagement in social media. Here are some of their statistical findings.

Keeping up with the industry

Very Beneficial: 16%
Somewhat: 29%
Not Beneficial: 55%

Monitoring what is being said about your business

Very Beneficial: 16%
Somewhat: 28%
Not Beneficial: 55%

Generating leads

Very Beneficial: 16%
Somewhat: 34%
Not Beneficial: 50%

Competitive intelligence

Very Beneficial: 14%
Somewhat: 29%
Not Beneficial: 57%

Improving customer experience

Very Beneficial: 12%
Somewhat: 29%
Not Beneficial: 59%

Resolving problems

Very Beneficial: 11%
Somewhat: 22%
Not Beneficial: 67%

Finding vendors/suppliers/partners

Very Beneficial: 10%
Somewhat: 28%
Not Beneficial: 62%

Recruiting for new employees

Very Beneficial: 8%
Somewhat: 19%
Not Beneficial: 73%

Background checks – employees, suppliers, etc.

Very Beneficial: 7%
Somewhat: 20%
Not Beneficial: 72%

Also, take a look at the comparative influence of each social network.

Facebook

Very Beneficial: 10%
Somewhat: 23%
Not Beneficial: 14%
Do not use: 53%

LinkedIn

Very Beneficial: 6%
Somewhat: 15%
Not Beneficial: 13%
Do not use: 67%

MySpace

Very Beneficial: 6%
Somewhat: 11%
Not Beneficial: 15%
Do not use: 68%

Twitter

Very Beneficial: 6%
Somewhat: 13%
Not Beneficial: 12%
Do not use: 69%

YouTube

Very Beneficial: 5%
Somewhat: 10%
Not Beneficial: 12%
Do not use: 73%

Slideshare recently announced their key tips for success using social media this year. I think they are worth a look.

Content in the resources library is often shared in the form of Slideshare files, so if you are unfamiliar with the platform, now would be a good time to check out their services as well.

Social media took a wild ride in 2009. The mainstream press fell in love with Twitter, Facebook grew aggressively and a new wave of companies starting taking social media seriously as a business tool. Below are 10 secrets to staying on top of it all in 2010

In a recent report, 'The Broad Reach of Social Technologies', an updated version of Forrester’s Social Technographics Ladder has been compiled which charts the levels of engagement we adopt with social networks and social media. Take a look below to consider where you lie, and perhaps more usefully, where you would wish to be in order to engage with both potential and current clients. The full report can be found here:  The Broad Reach of Social Technologies

Brian Solis has written the foreword to a new social media bible by Jacob Morgan; 'Twittfaced'. His blog reveals the foreword and i have to say it makes really good reading for anyone fighting the inner turmoil of should -I/shouldn't-I invest in marketting my business through solcial media. He also has some pretty powerful observations to make about the evolution of democracy through social media such as twitter, facebook, etc. I hope you enjoy his ideas (below) as much as I have.

The Human Network

Social media is a humbling topic, one that I do not approach without deep study and re?ection. On the surface, social media has democratized content, placing the power of publishing in the hands of every day people. Peeling back the collective layers, we realize something more profound however; social media has democratized and equalized in?uence and the ability to inspire action and establish vibrant and dedicated communities around a sense of purpose and belonging.

Whether we’re consumers or brand advocates or both, we have been given a powerful gift in the form of real-time, uninhibited access to information and intelligence and the people who share their insights—the new in?uencers.

It is how we choose to embrace this gift and as such employ it and also interact with new in?uencers that de?nes our presence and stature within the social landscape and in turn, the real world.

Indeed social media is a privilege and with it comes great responsibility (and accountability).

You are reading this book and therefore have made a conscious decision to learn, and for that, you’re to be commended. Social media is an elusive subject and its lessons are extensive, invaluable, and continuous. Attempting to master any form of emerging media provides us with a unique and tuned perspective that actually relegates us to a more meaningful and bene?cial role, one that represents practitioner, student, and apprentice.

We are always learning and we do so through observation and participation.

Questions are the seeds for cultivating knowledge and experience is the intelligence that serves as the curriculum for teaching and inspiring those around us. The shift from inquiry to practice is a pivotal step in earning a meaningful sense of understanding and judgment.

While we never cease to ask questions, we must also immerse ourselves in the online societies that will one day bene?t from our strategic participation. It is not done without intelligence of course and for all intents and purposes, we are responsible for what we learn and what we earn. Our rewards are measured in relationships and re?ective in communities and activity. Our failures are documented in the words and actions of in?uencers and visualized through the state of social capital and market share.

At some point, we must pause our reading, limit our attendance in webinars and conferences, and set aside our fears and excuses to listen and engage to the individuals who de?ne our communities in online networks. It’s where we learn and it’s where we begin to uncover the answers to our questions that only we could ful?ll speci?c to our own realities.

The study and application of emerging and interactive media is both an art and science. We have access to data, research, and academics that will provide us with an incredible knowledge base. It is our intuition and interpretation that determines our action however.

This is “social” media after all and therefore, we apply ourselves as individuals and personalities in everything we do. It is what we take away from our occurrences and experiences that de?nes our adeptness and shapes our future participation.

New media is a journey and not a destination. We grow in intellect and prowess at every stop in our ceaseless voyage. Thus, to succeed in social media requires us to study and grasp much more than what we know today. In many senses, throughout our interaction and immersion in interactive media, we become part marketer, customer service representative, publisher, connector, and digital anthropologist. We are the social architects who construct the framework for engagement and the engineers who build the roads between our stories, value, and wisdom for those seeking it.

In doing so, we become the very people we sought to reach and earn a place within the communities we hoped to galvanize. And, we learn through each instance and interaction to increase our awareness and eminence within our relevant networks.

The socialized Web is therefore more signi?cant when viewed as a human network (Cisco.)

Conversations are distributed across multiple social networks and real world factions. In all honestly, attention spans only continue to thin with every new network that vies for their participation. As such, we are forever in a competition to earn the attention of those whom de?ne and direct our markets, wherever they are active today. And as countless social networks and online communities populate the social Web, at ?rst glance, engagement could frighten and intimidate many or otherwise seem impossible to manage and scale.

It is the listening and observation that tells us everything. By searching keywords in individual social networks and also using effective listening tools and dashboards, we can reveal the exact networks where relevant traf?c and movement is transpiring right now. If we dive a bit deeper and view the activity through the lens of sociology and psychology, we also identify in?uencers, behavior, and cultures that govern each and every salient society.

While social and interactive media is connected and facilitated through technology, we are, in the end, attempting to make connections with people to engender relationships and in?uence action and responses.

We are forging connections with real people and those ties extend across networks—online and of?ine. If we are measured by the relationships and contacts that de?ne our social graph, then we must visualize the constructs of the graph as it will be de?ned less by activity within individual social networks and more through our interaction and connectedness with in?uencers, advocates, and stakeholders where they discover, share, and collaborate. In the process, we humanize our brand and our persona, allowing personal connections and cooperation.

The Web then begins to become a much smaller and more ef?cient platform for collaboration and communication. The minute we let conversations, both positive and negative, affect us, is the instance when we truly socialize and humanize our work. In the process we too, earn in?uence and thus we become much more important than we realize.

Actions speak louder than words and thus, we earn the relationships, in?uence, and the reputation we deserve.

This is your opportunity to de?ne and create your own destiny.

Be. Do. Get.

- Determine exactly where, who or what you strive to achieve.

-Symbolize and exercise the attributes, responsibilities, and disciplines required to earn and sustain your aspirations.

- Earn the very thing you were already becoming as you forced evolution through actions and outlook.

This is very much our moment in which we are empowered to shape how history remembers us.

In case you missed the panel and wanted to learn a bit more about how to monitor your competitors, I’ve got a recap handy for your reading (and monitoring) pleasure.

Matt Siltala

If you’re new to competitive monitoring and don’t know where to start, here are some tips:

* Hubs. Find and identify the easy ones. Look for places to find content ideas, links, sites that can help with keyword research and sites linking to more than one competitor.
* Press. How is your competition using press? This can help generate ideas by keeping up with trending opportunities, linking opportunities, etc.
* Review sites. Where are your competitors getting talked about? Who’s writing about them? How are these reviews getting done?
* Forums. Which forums are your competitors hanging out in, and how are they participating?
* Local search. How does your competition stack up on local search? Do they have any sort of local presence?
* Directories. Find the sites/directories that are linking to more than one competitor and see if you can get added to them.
* Anchor text. Find and identify everything there is to know about how the competition ranks.
* Unique domains linking in. Analyze how many unique domains are linking to your competitor to get a better idea of the work that’s ahead of you to get equivalent rankings.
* Strong content. Keep an eye on your competitors’ strongest pages.

Michael Gray

Michael shared a bunch of sites that he uses for competitive monitoring:

* Quarkbase — find out everything about a website, such as the most recent and popular pages people have submitted from this site to social media sites.
* Topsy
* Viralconversations.com
* Bit.ly — how many people have clicked on a particular link
* Tweetmeme

Use more than one site when monitoring, because each site will pull up slightly different information, and it’s important to have a comprehensive and varied view. Pay attention to who is talking about your competitors and note any patterns you find.

Plan a competitive monitoring course of action:

* Research how, where, and when your competition is engaging in social media
* Look for points with high levels of engagement or other success metrics
* Dissect their network, looking for their inner circle
* Join their network or build your own

Michael Streko

The other Michael on this panel recommended using incompetence to your advantage. Find out who’s linking to your competitors and point out any misspellings, outdated information, etc that you come across to see if they’d rather link to you instead. According to Streko, if it’s on the web, it’s fair game. Snoop snoop snoop. What they hide from the engines is your advantage.
Know your competitors’ presence:

* Monitor their social activity
* Use alerts to your advantage
* Use organic and paid keyword tracking
* Use SEM Rush

Use tools to compete. Watch their Alexa ranking, know their Compete score and use Quantcast data if it’s available. Set up similar sites if you can, then open up the lines of communication and request a link exchange. Also consider advertising on their site, since Adwords should give you a semi-accurate reading of their traffic.

Andy Beal

Andy went through a great list of different things to track. For your competition, track the company name, its CEO, its products and locations, etc. Keep an eye out for new products and features, media placements, sympathetic bloggers, etc.
For rants, track your company’s brand plus words like “sucks,” “defective,” “crap,” “poor,” “expensive,” etc. Try to poach their unhappy clients and customers, promote your alternative product, or use their feedback to improve your products.

Also track your competitors’ employees. Keep an eye on their blogs, social profiles, photos, videos and social presence on the web. “Loose lips sink brands,” as Andy put it. You can gather damaging evidence, glean new information about upcoming products or company news, or find potential hires. Also scour your competition’s job listings to find out information about new locations opening up, job turnover, expansion, products in development, etc.

You can also use Google to track a lot of competitor activity:

* Google.com/alerts via email or RSS
* Google Sidewiki
* Local listings

And you should be paying attention to Facebook. Read/monitor your competition’s fan pages and identify who their fans are. Search posts on Facebook and mentions to see who’s talking about them and in what way.

Track your competitors’ URLs too. Andy shared some good resources you can use:

* – Domaintools.com/registrant-alert will send you an alert any time a certain email address is used to register a domain name
* Domaintools.com/mark-alert will give you trademark alerts (whenever a competitor is registering a trademark)
* Oodle.com/job will alert you to job postings (the company name, location, skills/position)

Here are some advanced competitive monitoring tools. They vary in price but are worth checking out.

* Socialmention.com
* Trackur.com
* Radian6.com
* Visibletechnologies.com

Each year at Blogworld Expo, Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra presents The State of the Blogosphere as one of the event’s prestigious keynotes. For those who are unfamiliar with Technorati, it serves as a directory and search engine for the blogosphere as well as a benchmark for the ranking of blogs worldwide.

While there has been much discussion about the relevance and even demise of blogs as the statusphere and micro updates gained traction in addition to earning prominence in the mainstream spotlight, the reality is that blogs are a vital ingredient to the media ecosystem.

Released as a five-part series, Technorati provided a looking glass into the blogosphere and revealed the true shape and promise of this important medium.

Demographics

Analyzing the demographics of bloggers, we learn that they’re not necessarily similar to that of the Social Web. Where in Social Media, women rule, in the blogosphere it appears that men represent the majority of active blog authors.

Over the past several weeks, leaders in the search industry launched an aggressive, very public series of campaigns designed to capture the elusive future of search mind and market share.

The accelerated evolution of “real-time” search, introduced to us mostly through the adoption of Summize, which was eventually acquired to now serve as Twitter search, inspired both Google and Bing to release new iterations of its search engine to now include live Twitter results. Bing also announced a deal with Facebook to include status updates and shared content that were intentionally earmarked for public consumption – although this is expected to go into effect at a later date. Each announcement was strategically timed to release during the prestigious Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco while the technology world focused on tomorrow’s trends discussed during the show. With the great deal of attention thrust upon these two industry giants, Yahoo is now rumored to also have a real-time strategy in the works. Unlike Bing and Google however, Yahoo is potentially seeking to either partner with or acquire a current real-time search player.

And, just when we thought that the barrage of innovation was complete for the time being, Google announced another breakthrough that ushers in a new era of hybrid search, combining traditional search algorithms and social media. With Social Search, Google now introduces the results sourced from your social graph related to your original search term. For example, if you “Google” the name of a local restaurant, you will receive standard results in addition to other social media content such as a review posted by a friend in Yelp. Or, if you’re searching a topic, a friend’s blog post on the subject may also surface in the results. Social Search provides a peer-to-peer element to everyday research packaged in an existing paradigm that doesn’t alter your patterns or behavior for discovery.

Jake Matthews of 10e20 wrote last week about how to use twitter to support your company's online presence. Here is his article, which is worth 10 minutes. The strategies are not all new, but are good advice for anyone trying to use twitter to get their slice of social network based advertising.

There are thousands of businesses on Twitter, and certainly many businesses are doing a fine job of connecting with their customers. Still, many organizations large and small, from Fortune 500’s to mom and pop shops, can reach farther and do better at communicating and building an audience on Twitter. Several are simply unsure of how or when to enter the network and what do once they are there.  And many companies want to look at Twitter as a place to sell, when in fact Twitter is a communications tool, a place to build relationships.  When companies set aside selling and employ Twitter for communications and relationship building, they tend to find long-term success.

A Twitter account is meant to be a place where you can network, communicate messages and gather feedback from the people most interested in your business. It’s also a place discover potential new clients and to inform followers and media to help spread word to those who have never heard of you. All too often businesses are not making the proper time investment in this important social network, thereby not getting the most out of Twitter.

Here are some basic rules of thumb to remember when entering this social network which may help you and your business connect better with your target market and the Twitter community at large.

Invest

By invest, I mean spend time, and we all know time is money, so this is your investment. Spend time watching how others use Twitter and spend time tweeting yourself. Or, spend time to work with an employee to get them tweeting in a meaningful way. A good time investment for a small business may be a few hours per week, and for a larger company it can range right up to a few hours per day depending on your business vertical.

Manage

Manage your account from a more robust application than the Twitter web interface itself.  Tweedeck is a good starting place as a basic application. If you’re a smaller business or frequently “on-the-go”, working with a hand-held application such as TwitterBerry from Orangatame is great to keep your account up to date and relevant while on the move.

Watch

Follow ongoing hashtag #conversations with #Keyword and respond in a helpful manner, but not by hawking your products. Be a resource rather than trying to sell. For example, if you run an auto parts supply company, try #carchat and help debunk myths in conversations about car repair, or offer up suggestions on ways to handle auto-repair problems.  Again, don’t look to sell, look to build relationships.

Listen

Listen to what your customers are saying about your company, services, brand or products.  This is an opportunity to build loyalty. Offer responses and feedback in a meaningful way, either through public (@reply) or private (direct message) channels. Followers gravitate to true and honest customer service.

Listen to the content of other tweets. Twitter SEARCH!! – use the Twitter search function relentlessly. While it needs polishing in terms of overall functionality, it has a tremendous ability to help you mine data and measure sentiment and perception about your products, services and industry. One of the great things about Twitter search is it is pretty much real time, up to the minute indexing of tweets, so you have the opportunity to find some of the most current feedback about a subject.  Beware of Tweetspam where spammers #tag popular subjects for the sake of getting clicks to their sites.  A keen eye can quickly sift through the BS, and I’m sure Twitter will be working to remedy some of that over time.

Speak

Establish a voice. Create a regular “editorial calendar” for your account so that you have relevant content for your business which can be posted.  Why not discuss the latest news from your events department?  Recently finish a major project? Perhaps it’s worthy of a brief announcement.  Have you established a new strategic relationship in your industry?  Perhaps you can tweet their account and get some public synergy.  Any big game-changing news in your industry?  You can link to your company blog post where you discuss that.  The opportunities for an editorial calendar are endless.

Optimize for Keywords

It’s worth it to include relevant keyphrases which users may search for in Twitter search to find related information.  Others are listening to keyphrase conversations, so why not take advantage of that?  Don’t go nuts with plugging in industry keywords into your posts and don’t keyword spam, but be cognizant of how you are phrasing your tweets.  For example: “We’ll be speaking at upcoming conferences (link)!”  vs “We’ll be speaking at PubCon, SES and other events this year! (link)”

Identify

A company is made up of people. Don’t be a afraid to say who you are or where your tweets are coming from. Even though you’re a company you shouldn’t be afraid to say who your tweets are coming from.

Don’t automate: Try not to automate responses or direct message replies, either. This wears thin on users and often turns them off and may result in someone un-following you.

Learn

Watch Twitter leaders and how they handle their networks. You can learn a lot and apply that back to your business. Some well executed business accounts are Dell, Zappos, etc.  Watch how others form their tweets and the tools they use to handle various announcements, broadcasts or replies.

Grow

Grow your account following by creating awareness of where it is.  It’s important to grow your account following and influence so that you can reach a larger audience.  Not every business needs huge audiences (hundreds of thousands of followers), but you need an audience large enough to get word out and have an impact.

How can you grow it?

• Let your customers know you are on Twitter and what they can expect by following you.
• Place a Twitter badge on your website with a call to action prompting them them to click over to your account.
• Place a badge with a call to action in your email drops.
• Add the Twitter handle or address on your print material communications.
  • Catalogs
  • Menus
  • Business Cards
  • Newsmailers
  • Special offers
• Show or talk about your Twitter address (where appropriate) in your media-buys, whether it’s online or offline in TV/cable/radio spots.
• Use search to follow others who are discussing your subjects related to your business vertical and follow them.

No matter your business vertical, whether B2B or B2C, there is fantastic opportunity to connect with your current and future customers on Twitter. Part of the success of Twitter is overcoming the fear, learning by trial and beginning to listen and act on the conversations taking place in this important social network.  Overcome your fear of Twitter, be sure to make the time investment, reference these handy Twitter rules of thumb and your company will reap rewards over time.

PR2.0 writer Brian Solis wrote a brilliant article recently on the futute of the social web - I think it's well worth a read when considering the place of social networking in your company's PR startegy. I haveincluded it below: enjoy. Or you can view it directly on his site, The Future of the Social Web

October 30, 2009

Source: Shutterstock

Prior to leaving Forrester to join Altimeter Group, Jeremiah Owyang, along with Josh Bernoff, Cynthia N. Pflaum, and Emily Bowen, published a report that attempted to bring the future of the Social Web into focus. If we viewed the content of his research as a social object, the conversations that would transpire could in fact expedite the development and implementation of the most valuable predictions and observations contained within.

The first part of the report observes the state of the Social Web and summarizes its direction:

Today’s social experience is disjointed because consumers have separate identities in each social network they visit. A simple set of technologies that enable a portable identity will soon empower consumers to bring their identities with them — transforming marketing, eCommerce, CRM, and advertising. IDs are just the beginning of this transformation, in which the Web will evolve step by step from separate social sites into a shared social experience. Consumers will rely on their peers as they make online decisions, whether or not brands choose to participate. Socially connected consumers will strengthen communities and shift power away from brands and CRM systems; eventually this will result in empowered communities defining the next generation of products.

In the report, Forrester documents the evolution and direction of the Social Web in several distinct stages:

1. The era of social relations – Starting with AOL and others in the mid-1990s, this era witnessed the connection of people through simple profiles and friending features that served as the foundation for online conversations through connections.

2. The era of social functionality – Evolving from friending to platforms that supported social interaction through applications and infrastructure, facilitating communities through relationships locked within the confines of a particular network.

As I’ve said before, social networks are jockeying to become our individual online OS – a Social OS essentially. Facebook released its Facebook Connect infrastructure to allow us to traverse the social web with our Facebook identity and relationships in tow, bridging our updates back to the Facebook News Feed to share with our social graph. This is a monumental furtherance as it starts to demonstrate the power of an interconnected activity and profile stream and network that makes the Social Web a much smaller place.

However, what we really need is a “Facebook Connect” within every site, not confined to or benefiting any one network. This will create the segue-way to the era of social colonization as predicted by Forrester.

This need is of particular, perhaps even consequential, interest to brands as they will spend an insurmountable amount of time, resources, and money trying to engage in noteworthy conversions across multiple networks of interest.

3. The era of social colonization – Deemed as the next stage of social evolution, which will emerge as soon as this year, tools such as OpenID and Facebook connect will enable individuals to freely journey from network to network. Forrester believes that we will be able to do so with our social graph in tact, but I believe that the initial phase of social colonization will make a general identity portable between networks. The portability of corresponding data, social objects, and friendships we maintain in each network becomes the Holy Grail.

For consumers, surfing the Web is no longer a lonely experience. Forrester foresees the release of new browsers and frictionless, uncomplicated technologies that allow people to truly surf the Web with friends or see what they’re doing in real-time.

Like we’re already witnessing or hearing (depending on your status on the  invitation list), Google Wave represents the ability to centralize and aggregate user activities and collaboration across the Web and across multiple platforms.

Forrester also observes that this era of colonization will leverage the recommendations of peers within the communities where individuals are active. Brands can capitalize on this behavior by instilling and engendering advocacy through direct engagement, blogger relations in the magic middle, and also via sponsored conversations.

This will serve as the bridge to social context.

4. The era of social context – Starting in 2010, social networks and sites will recognize the preferences of users, but more significantly, they will also recognize personal identities and relationships to customize the experience based on preference and behavior.

While this technology already powers, at varying levels, dedicated networks such as Trusted Opinion and Yelp, this functionality will be inherent to future networks using technology similar to Baynote to leverage the Wisdom of the Crowds as it inspires the personalization of content for each individual. Baynotes believes that the Web, and sites in particular, can learn from collective intelligence to improve the experience based on the behavior of crowds over individuals.

In the near future, much of the content will be automated, but will still rely on the explicit express of individuals to improve the experience. As Forrester notes, “Portable IDs mean you’ll be able to flip a switch to tell Nike you’re a woman who runs 12 miles a week and immediately see the shoes that are best for you — along with input from experiences of your running buddies.”

I believe that the combination of semantic and collective intelligence systems will improve the content and overall interaction within sites and social networks over time.

5. The era of social commerce – In 2011 – 2012, social networks will eclipse corporate Web sites and CRM systems. Forrester believes that communities will become a driving force for innovation and as such, companies will be forced to formally cater to communities, signifying the trading of power towards connected customers.

The Dawn of SRM

While Forrester predicts the era of Social Commerce, the future of the social Web as I see it, starts to embrace a corporate philosophy and supporting infrastructure that migrates away from CRM and even sCRM to one of Social Relationship Management or SRM. This will usher in the fifth era as observed by Forrester. And, SRM is also acutely cognizant of and in harmony with VRM (Vendor Relationship Management). Championed by Doc Searls, Chris Carfi, among others, VRM is the opposite of CRM, capsizing the concept of talking at or marketing to customers and shifting the balance of power in relationships from vendors to consumers. As such, systems are created to empower consumer participation and sentiment and improve products and services with every engagement.

While some believe that relationships aren’t technically manageable, in the world of business and a vibrant and influential social Web, it is not a question. And for all intents and purposes, they’re still personable.

The Social Web is distributing influence beyond the customer landscape, allocating authority amongst stakeholders, prospects, advocates, decision makers, and peers. SRM recognizes that whether someone recommended a product, purchased a product, or simply recognized it publicly, in the end, each makes an impact on behavior at varying levels.

Therefore customers are now merely part of a larger equation that also balances vendors, experts, partners, and other authorities. In the realm of SRM, influence is distributed and it is recognizes wherever and however it takes shape.

SRM is a doctrine aligned with a humanized business strategy and supporting technology infrastructure and platform. SRM recognizes that all people, no matter what system they use, are equal. It represents a wider scope of active listening and participation across the full spectrum of influence mapped to specific department representatives within the organization using various lenses for which to identify individuals where and how they interact.

From Adoption to Sophistication, No Social Network is an Island

Forrester recognizes that the past five years of Social Media evolution have focused on growth and adoption, but anticipates that the next stage of advancement  is dedicated to improving social functionality. I would also add personalization and portability. The biggest opportunity for the expansion of social networks is to build bridges between these isolated islands to deliver a more fulfilling, meaningful and productive experience. As I see it, we will start to see a the social web not as a collection of distributed islands, but as one greater collective better known as a human network – a contextual and relationship-based network that consists of like-minded individuals no matter where their profile resides.

In the near-term, the future of the Social Web starts with our online identity.

Whereas in Social Media, content is still king, in the business of social networking, data is its currency. I believe that everything starts with empowering the individual with the ability to host one secure profile/identify online that would serve existing and emerging social networks across the Web. OpenID, for example, provides central and protect login credentials for users, connecting identities to other third-part networks including Google, PayPal, AOL, MySpace, among others. Perhaps the future lies with making data mobile while still providing value to the economics of social networks. DataPortability.org is working with some of the most renowned networks to enable users to bring their identity, friends, conversations, files and histories with them, without having to manually add them to each new service. Each of the services we choose to use can draw on this information relevant to the context within each network. As our experiences and connections accumulate and change corresponding data, this information will update on other sites and services if permitted, without having to revisit others to re-enter or re-create it.

The future of the Social Web must begin with data portability to accelerate proliferation throughout Roger’s Diffusion of Innovation adoption system. The lack of it might serve as either the “chasm” that hinders mainstream adoption or the monopolization of user data by a few dominant players.

How do you envision the future of the Social Web?

This article is taken from a recent post at PR2.0, a social media marketing company in Silicon Valley. The observations about gender ratios are quite startling, and may give you someting to think about when approaching your online presence. Leave your thoughts after the article.

I recently published a detailed survey and analysis of the demographics that define the most popular social networks. While I shared the overall data for general review, there were a few interesting observations that were extracted by Information is Beautiful, Mashable, and Next Web that certainly inspire conversations and reactions.

The point of interest that’s worth review and discussion is that in Social Media, women rule.

Facebook:
Male: 43%
Female: 57%

Delicious
Male: 48%
Female: 52%

Docstoc
Male: 41%
Female: 59%

Flickr
Male: 45%
Female: 55%

Myspace
Male: 36%
Female: 64%

Ning
Male: 41%
Female: 59%

Twitter
Male: 43%
Female: 57%

Upcoming.org
Male: 45%
Female: 55%

Ustream.tv
Male: 34%
Female: 66%

Yelp
Male: 43%
Female: 57%

InformationisBeautiful.net lives up to its name with its translation of my research into this stunning infographic: