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Top Social Media Sites December 31, 2008

Posted by Angelia Chandra in Research data, Social Media, Social Networking, Weblogs.
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I found one interesting statistics data called Top Social Media Sites 2008 published at www.washingtonpost.com today. This research is conducted by comScore, an Internet marketing research company that provides marketing data and services to many of the Internet’s largest businesses. (see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ComScore)

comScore ranked websites by its worldwide traffic stats dated November 2008, as follows:

  1. Blogger (222 million)

  2. Facebook (200 million)

  3. MySpace (126 million)

  4. WordPress (114 million)

  5. Windows Live Spaces (87 million)

  6. Yahoo Geocities (69 million)

  7. Flickr (64 million)

  8. hi5 (58 million)

  9. Orkut (46 million)

  10. Six Apart (46 million)

  11. Baidu Space (40 million)

  12. Friendster (31 million)

  13. 56.com (29 million)

  14. Webs.com (24 million)

  15. Bebo (24 million)

  16. Scribd (23 million)

  17. Lycos Tripod (23 million)

  18. Tagged (22 million)

  19. imeem (22 million)

  20. Netlog (21 million)

Blogger, which is on top of the chart, has grown 44% since the last survey in November 2007. Facebook, surprisingly, is up 116% reaching 200 million users. My Space is pretty steady while WordPress has grown 68%. On the other hand, Windows Live Spaces is down 22%.

Click here for similar ranking in 2007.

The “Dell-Hell” issue December 27, 2008

Posted by Angelia Chandra in Social Media, Weblogs.
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As I mentioned in my previous blogs, negative comments or stories about products or services is inevitable in the practise of PR on the Web 2.0 world. “Dell – Hell” is one such example of a negative comment that appeared on a blog and brought down the company reputation. not-dell-but-hell

It all started when one customer, named Jeff Jarvis, complained about a Dell laptop he had bought by writing all of his complaints on his blog and tagged it Dell – Hell. However, the Dell company did not give him any response. His blog was then followed by other unsatisfied users and this got larger and larger and eventually resulted in Dell’s sales drop.

Fortunately, after a lot of efforts, Dell managed to cope with it. Now Dell has its own corporate blog called Direct2Dell and it even has its own employees’ blogs called Your Blog.

Take a look at Jeff Jarvis’ blog – The Buzzmachine where you can find more information about the Dell Hell issue.

Or click here for a shorter explanation of this issue as well as some interesting lessons from which PR practitioners could learn, also written by Jeff Jarvis.

The Trend of Blogging December 26, 2008

Posted by Angelia Chandra in PR and Web 2.0, Research data, Social Media, Weblogs.
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Weblogs is one of the applications that play an important role in the PR 2.0 industry.

This year, there are about 346 millions people in this world that read blogs and there is an 11% growth compared to last year. (source: The McCann research – the Social Media Tracker Wave 3).

More and more people are reading blogs online. So I think instead of spending a lot of money for media relations programme trying to convince reporters to cover news, why not try to create a blog or target bloggers to help us convey our messages directly to our target public online? We no longer need to wait for the traditional media to cover our news. We are now free from their filter and we have the power to send our messages across directly to our targeted public and this is all so GREAT!

After setting up blogs or having bloggers write our stories, we should be happy that all our hard work are actually worth it. Just take a look at the research result below:

Blogs Usage

However, there is a problem. Not everyone is writing a favourable story for us. Someone might post, write or leave negative comments and/or stories in their blogs and we have no control over that. Of course, we should be worried about that!

However, according to David Meerman Scott in his book “The New Rules of Marketing and PR”, he said: “I strongly believe that comments from readers offering different viewpoints than the original post are actually a good thing on a blog, because they add credibility to your viewpoint by showing two sides of an issue and by highlighting that your readership is passionate enough to want to contribute to a debate on your blog”.

I agree with David as it is much more credible to have both positive and negative comments/stories on blogs. It makes much more sense to the readers that all the opinions do come from actual users of the products or services rather than just posting some edited comments on the blogs, for example. We need to welcome such negative feedbacks and then find an effective way to handle the criticisms.