Facebook overtook Google as the most visited site in the US last week.

Figures for week ending 13th March, released by Hitwise shows Facebook visits accounted for 7.07 percent of all websites, compared to 7.03 percent for Google.

Facebook has temporarily spiked ahead of Google before, on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 2009 but Hitwise charts show that Facebook, with more than 400 million members, may now surge ahead of Google permanently.

Membership growth is one factor, the rapid rise in social gaming another, with games like Mafia Wars generating nearly 10 million Facebook fans.

Facebook’s marketshare of visits has grown 185% in a year, compared to Google’s 9% rise in the same period.

80% of visitors to company blogs are coming for the first time, a survey from Compendium has revealed.

The findings suggest that a company blog is more important as a new business tool than was previously thought.

First time visitors come from two major sources, referring sites and search engines, confirming that good quality content that is keyword optimised, will pull traffic to company sales funnels.

Research amongst Furlong PR customers suggests that 75% of blog traffic comes from social networking sites and 25% from SEO.

Compendium’s survey also looked at use of Twitter. Approximately 43 percent of companies surveyed had established a Twitter account.

Twitter usage was highest among B-to-B companies with 87 percent maintaining an account.

The average open rate for UK email marketers is 22.5% according to research from email service provider Silverpop.

Average click through rate in the UK is 4.8%

Silverpop compared three country markets in the study, UK, USA & Germany, finding that open rates were highest in Germany, averaging 24.9% and lowest in the US at 21.3%

Click through rate in Germany was also highest at 5% and again lowest in the US with 4.5%

Researchers pulled a random sample set of 7,000 email messages, delivered to a minimum of 50 recipients in the United States, United Kingdom and Germany.

Approximately 50 million emails were delivered across the messages to 188 countries.

The well choreographed Mark Owen affair unfolding in the British papers is a lesson in how celebrity indiscretions can be managed without apparent loss of reputation or a dent in earning power.

The photos of sad, charmingly scruffy Owen, reflecting we imagine, his tortured, repentant state - his downcast yet forgiving wife at the door of their Wandsworth home - it’s so right, it could be from a Take That Christmas video.

And there’s the killer reference to Robbie Williams, Owen’s pal who is helping him through his alcohol problems - the perfect image reference point. Whoever put this together is some sort of PR Jedi.

The Tiger Woods affair(s), on the other hand was not so much image management, as a cautionary tale. Woods finally hired a PR adviser this week - Ari Fleischer whose previous clients include..George W Bush.

Fleischer has some experience of golf related issues - back in 2002 it was Bush’s antics on the golf course rather than off it that caused a few red faces, specifically this video clip: Read the rest of this entry »

Shoe brands VANS and Converse along with Starbucks and Skittles were the four fastest growing Facebook brands this week, according to Inside Facebook, a blog that monitors fan pages.

While VANS and Converse may be benefiting from the consolidation of old Facebook fan pages into one main page, Skittles appears to be growing due to a voucher offer which allows registered fans to buy two packets of Skittles for the price of one (BOGOF).

Outside of consumer brands, the top twenty is dominated by pop stars, footballers and social media games. From a British perspective, good to see hit TV programme House, starring Hugh Laurie make an appearance at number 20 with a gain of 65,800 fans following its return to TV screens last week.

The overall rankings for brands’ fans on Facebook looks like this, Starbucks (6.1m) Coca-Cola (5.1m) Skittles (3.9m) Nutella (3.6m)  Pringles (3m).

This week’s fastest risers chart below. Read the rest of this entry »

LinkedIn was the favourite social media site for professionals at work in 2009, with 86% of worldwide internet users referring to it, a jump of 24% on 2008.

The survey from internet security firm FaceTime Communications shows that most professionals use LinkedIn to network with colleagues (79%), to learn about colleagues (66%) and for general research (61%). Only 37% were using LinkedIn for marketing to customers.

While only 13% said they used Twitter in 2008 for work purposes, the number leapt to 76% in 2009, overtaking Digg, Delicious and YouTube in the professional social networking pecking order though these also experienced substantial increases.

Facebook is still regarded as mainly a personal social networking site and in another survey reported in eMarketer, by Liberty Mutual, three quarters of employees Read the rest of this entry »

A survey into the perceived risks of social networking to organisations has found most employers unprepared for potential employee misuse, according to Brisbane City News.

Conducted by social media legal specialists, Rostron Carlyle, spokesperson Malcolm Burrows, said while 76 per cent of respondents claimed they used social networking sites at work, 54 per cent said their work place did not have a social media policy.

“When it comes to legal safeguards, it seems most are unsure what to do, or simply underestimate the dangers involved,” Burrows said. “Social media comes with serious risks, such as loss of confidential information, breach of copyright and privacy, discrimination, defamation, even infringement of industry specific legislation.”

The survey also found that while 55 per cent of companies fear social media will affect their business reputation, few precautions have been put in place to protect it.  Read the rest of this entry »

Excerpt from Australian news programme The Hungry Beast on why Google is actually quite scary:

During an average PR week, there’s usually a journalist somewhere moaning online about how PR people pitch to them, typically large attachments that crash in-boxes, irrelevancy or email box bombing.

No doubt you could hear the same number of moans from PR people about journalists, tales of junior account handlers reduced to tears, staggering arrogance, but of course you don’t, because you don’t bite the hand that feeds your client’s stories into the marketplace, you bite your tongue instead.

Having said that, it’s understandable that journalists may occasionally crack under an onslaught of badly researched pitches, inspiring no doubt this funny send-up of a silicon valley start-up PR embargo. I shouldn’t laugh, but I did.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has conceded that 140 characters are not always enough to get your message across, especially when it comes to summarising the amazing growth of your micro-blogging site in the last year.

Stone used 1552 characters in his email newsletter to account holders yesterday, offering some insight to the highlights of Twitter’s ‘annus miraculous’

Accounts opened were up 1,500%, Twitter employees rose 500% to 146 - the latest being Aaron, “an engineer focused on building internal tools to help promote productivity, communication, and support within our company. We celebrated with a little dance party.”

Stone mentions the new features introduced - Twitter lists, retweets and mobile apps, plus the humanitarian and charitable uses Twitter has been put to, “Twitter is more than a triumph of technology — it is a triumph of humanity. Projects like Fledgling and Hope140 were inspired by you.”

In a veiled reference to the huge proportion of unused accounts, estimated to be 83% of the 50 million plus opened, Stone says in the opening paragraph “If you haven’t visited in a while, we’d like to invite you to come have a look at http://twitter.com — we’ve been busy!”