What is Social News?

Wikipdeia defines it as “Social news refers to websites where users submit and vote on news stories or other links, thus determining which links are presented.”

I am not going to make this a long list of a lot of social news sites, it will run into pages. For starters, we will keep it very simple – top 5 social news sites and their key features which you got to know to leverage the power of social news.

1) Digg

Focus : Everything related to news – from technology, business, politics to general news.

This is the most popular social news website on the internet. It covers a vast variety of topics and also provides facility for ‘digging’ images and videos.

2) Reddit

Focus : Everything related to news – from technology, business, politics to general news.

A basic looking site but has an extremely large user base. Includes sections, known as subreddits, on almost all topics including politics, technology and science.

3) Propeller

Focus : Everything including news, politics and science, just like dig.
It has ‘channels’ on almost every topic. Its unusual design has received widespread criticism. But nevertheless, it remains a popular social news site on the web.

4) Mixx

Focus: Covers everything including business, entertainment and sports
Lists user-recommendations for stories, photos and videos. Users can customize the start page, join private groups, and rate content. Though it has been launched recently in 2007, it quickly become one of the leading social news websites mainly due to the additional features it offers.

5) Slashdot

Focus: Technology
An extremely popular niche website used predominantly by web developers and programmers.

If you haven’t tasted the flavor of social news sites…go ahead and explore these….you will get a good idea of what its all about!

• Every minute, 10 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube
• The facebook.com domain was purchased for $200,000
• MySpace was founded by former Friendster members in 2003. It was purchased in 2005 for $580 million by Rupert Murdoch
• Wikipedia is one of the largest reference Web sites, attracting at least 684 million visitors yearly by 2008. There are more than 75,000 active contributors working on more than 10,000,000 articles in more than 250 languages.
• As of November 2007, flickr.com claims to host more than 2 billion images
• It is estimated that nearly 90 percent of internet users in the Philippines have Friendster accounts
• Two-thirds of Brazilian net users use Orkut

A comparison of the adoption of Social media in Forture 500 v/s Inc 500 companies brings to light some surprising results. This is based on a study was conducted by The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research. It is a follow up to a similar study they conducted in 2007.  The survey focused on six prominent social media – blogging, online video, podcasting, social networking, messaging/ bulletin boards and wikis and spanned 209 countries.

The results prove that social media has penetrated parts of the business world at a great speed. Though this shows that corporate usage of social media has doubles for Inc. 500 companies, the number is not great for Fortune 500 companies. Since the Inc. 500 represent a list of fastest-growing private US companies, in my view, it would be quite valid to assume that social media is also one of the key factors to the growth of these companies in the present scenario.

The study also dives deeper into each some of the social media across the Inc. 500 companies.

While social networking, online videos and blogging are the clear winners, even the least use podcasting has 21% adoption. 77% of the companies in the Inc. 500 use some or the other social media over the 57% in the previous year. This further proves the huge importance of social media in the fastest growing companies in the United States.

To another question – how important are social media technologies for your business the response was no less encouraging. A huge 78% said that it was either ‘very important’ or ‘somewhat important’. Only 20% said that it was ‘somewhat unimportant’ or ‘ very unimportant’.

Well, one thing is certain out of the study – the Inc. 500 are aggressively embracing social media, can the rest of corporate America afford to be far behind?

For the detailed report of the study, click here.

In my previous post, I gave an overview of some of the top social media sites based on their Alexa ranking. However, when it comes to Social Networking sites, understanding their key geographies of dominance becomes very important, both for users and marketers. Let’s take a closer look at this…

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A    Few highlights:·

• Facebook emerges as a strong network internationally closely followed by MySpace ·
• Orkut is pretty strong in Brazil and the Indian subcontinent. In fact, did you know that more than 2/3^rd of the Brazilian net users use Orkut. ·
• hi5 has strong presence in certain pockets across the globe. This is mainly in Peru, Columbia, Mongolia, Thailand etc. An interesting discussion is how it has established such dominant presence in select pockets. But I’ll leave that for some other time.·
• Friendster, one of the foremost social networks is mainly dominant in south-east Asia. In fact, it is estimated that nearly 90 percent of internet users in the Philippines have Friendster accounts!

While networks are trying to grow their presence across various countries, this is now simple even for the number Uno network. The underlying key to social networking is a user’s group of friends should be on
that network. Once a user establishes a circle of friends on a particular network, it is pretty difficult to  migrate the users to other networks, no matter how good the services provided!

For example, currently 61% of Facebook users come from only 3 countries – US, UK and Canada.  For the #1 social networking site to displace the regional market leaders like Friendster in South-east Asia, Bebo in part of Europe and Orkut in South Asia and Latin America is not going to be any easy task. But, knowing the speed at which Facebook has traveled from Harvard to Ivy League schools, further  to high schools and corporate networks and finally, to the entire internet community…millions of eyes are glued to track its progresses now!

This is a list of some of the most used Social Media websites. I have sorted them based on their Alexa rank to get an idea of their popularity. The category and overview gives you an idea about each of them.

If you haven’t tried out some of them…now is the time! Because its certain – many of them are here to stay!