Nobody has time to read anymore, right?  Every day we are all inundated with more and more information overload coming from credible and yet to be verified sources.  Where can Internet users find relief? Answer: the infographic.  Infographics are a wonderful mix of key data and visualization that can really bring the message home if put together correctly.  So without further ado, we bring you our top 10 favorite social media infographics!

1 – World Map of Social Networks

Let’s start at the 50,000 foot view, shall we?

2 – Age Distribution on Social Network Sites

Is age distribution targeting more your thing? Pingdom put together an excellent overview by social network:

3 – Social Media Periodic Table of Elements

As we previously reported, our friend and fellow Advertising Age Power 150 member Eyecube created another great visualization called the social media periodic table of elements:

4 – The Conversation Prism

No social media infographic collection would be complete without Brian Solis’ Conversation Prism:

5 – The Boom of Social Sites

Focus.com put together an outstanding visual showing both the size and timeline of social communities:

6 – Make Social Media Work For Your Company

7 – Hubspot Twitter Territory

Hubspot of Twitter Grader fame nailed it with a slick infographic showing how each state’s Twitter usage compares to the national average:

8 – How Twitter Got Attacked by DDOS

If you’re a frequent Twitter user, you’ll remember the great DDOS attack as a period of social media withdrawal:

9 – Air Force Web Posting Response Assessment V.2

While we’re on the subject of Internet security, we’d be remiss to not mention the US Air Force’s blogging assessment flowchart infographic:

10 -Visualizing 6 Years of Facebook

We thought that the best way to round out this list would be to celebrate Facebook’s recent 6th anniversary – Muhammad Saleem put together this excellent infographic over at Mashable:

Guest post by Justin Parks – He’s Northern Irish and a big time advocate of social media stuff and making sure its done right.  Loves a pint of the black stuff from time to time and tends to swear a lot.  You have been warned!   He hangs out on twitter and on his social media blog Justinparks.com.

There is no question that social media is hitting the mainstream. It is evolving into a major part of the Internet, developing hordes of devoted users and advocates who are raising their hands in the air and creating virtual Mexican waves* with their ability of share information almost completely unrestricted around the world and its all good.  Thing is, people aren’t doing the Mexican wave the world over…yet.  Welcome to Europe.
(*note – cultural point one.)

Brian kindly pointed this out this idiomatic difference. You know that thing in a stadium where some people stand up and throw their hands in the air and the next row does it and so on until it comes back on itself?  In the USA its called a “Doing the Wave,” while in Europe it’s called a “Mexican Wave.”  Mexico is way closer to the States than Europe.  Go figure.

Back to the point.

The USA and Europe are different.  We all know this but it tends to be overlooked somewhat mostly because of assumption more than anything else.  We simply assume that things are the same when, if we take a second, we realise that they are very different, and being aware of these differences can make the process of making connections and engaging that much simpler.

Lets just think about the USA first.

People from New York are different from folks in California and Texas and even from Washington DC.  Americans know this instinctively and react accordingly to accounting for gender, race, home base (the country, the city, the mountains or the beach), age and eduction.  Differences aside, all are Americans and regional differences in culture or outlook are still relatively small compared to Europe.

Over the last few years social media has surged forward and upward with the USA adopting, adapting and developing the tools, etiquette, formalities and understanding as you require it and basically taking it through the initial teething problems associated with any new invention or technology, probably helped along by the very same reason in the previous paragraph.  Now its hitting Europe.

Now lets take a second and think about Europe. It’s different.  Very Different to the States and the differences are obvious.  First and foremost there is a huge language barrier.  That’s a no-brainer right there – language has split Europe up and actually curtails social media as each country and community created are heavily influenced by their own mother tongue. This also causes fragmentation in the general consensus of the web and where we all “hang out”.

Not sure what I mean?

Have a look at this short list of social networking sites in Europe.

Take Facebook as an example.  While it has dominated across the majority of Europe it still misses out in Germany, Russia, The Netherlands, Ireland, Portugal and Austria as the most popular social networking platform.

While this is kind of understandable from Russia’s perspective due to culture as much as language, the one that stands out for me is Ireland, a modern, established and in the majority English speaking nation but one which has not “jumped on the bandwagon” making it somewhat of an exception especially when its closest neighbour, the UK is the top user of that very same platform.

Lets think about cultural differences then. Its just so damn complicated that we to some the whole thing will be like talking to aliens and, far be it for a beer drinking Irish man who’s kissed the blarney stone to fall into stereotypes but the only way to address it without writing a 63 part novel is, yep, you guessed it..by looking at stereotypes.

Ireland

Getting us out of the way first, (us is “the Irish”) we tend to swear a lot on twitter, and in most other forms of social media and we are the Mayor of most of the pubs in the world on FourSquare, even if we haven’t been there in person we still somehow manage it.

United Kingdom

The British are a diverse lot who cant really be nailed with any single stereotype today but tend to frequent the major social English speaking social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Bebo scores high here as well.

France

The French don’t tend to hang around on English speaking social networks (non!) and congregate on their own French built and run sites like SkyRock (the 6th largest social network in the world).

Germany

The Germans mainly hang out on XING and “make business” in efficient and straightforward ways as this social stuff is a waste of time when there is work to be done or if they are feeling a little frisky they head over to Yigg.de… dont ask, I have no idea what it means.

The Netherlands

The Dutch are spending most of their time on Hyving and the Swedish, Norwegians and Danish all tend to stick together and will frequent places like Playahead while the Polish are familiar with Nasza-klasa.pl (you can try saying it, I sure as hell can’t).

Spain

The Spanish enjoy staying in touch in a relaxed and not so pressurized way via the Tuenti network that’s still invite only or via their own version of Digg, Meneame and the Italians decided that they didn’t like the blue bird on twitter and prefer to play about on Meemi (which is, as far as I can tell, a complete rip off from Twitter anyway but well, who’s bothered really).

Are you guys in the USA starting to get the picture now? It’s not so cut and dry is it?  I’m jealous really, that in the USA the barriers to speak to anyone else in the country are so low even across thousands of miles – but not here!

Take it from some one who grew up in a society (ever heard of Ulster and “The Troubles”?) that was divided by colour (favourite colour not race), religion, sport, politics, education, history and language and is used to the nuances and differences between towns and villages not more than 3 miles apart, this type of cross culturalism is second nature to me.

Finally, we have to start thinking about even further afield, to countries outside the “west”. China has a massive social networking community on Qzone, Brazil favors Orkut and even Iran is incredibly active online with its social networking community Cloob.

How do you approach it and how will you react when something strikes you as “not normal” in the social media realm simply because it’s foreign.  Is it just “not normal” to you? How are we going to reach across these divides in the future to take full advantage of the web and the potential for interconnectivity, if in fact we can ever achieve it.

The reason for this post is to have a rather fleeting consideration at the little things about social media when the physical restrictions are removed and we all get “more connected” between the USA and Europe and indeed the rest of the world. What cultural differences will we realise and how will we react to them, how will we engage across cultures and how will we appreciate and understand others point of view and ideals and what can we learn from them.

I didn’t intend this post to be scientific, but rather more observational and reflective as a means to consider social media in Europe in comparison to the USA and what it means. I hope it has provoked something for you to consider.

If you’ve ever spoken to me personally, you probably know by now that I’m not a big fan of ROI. (My response to Samir’s post may give you a bit more insight on some of my ROI thoughts.)

In general, I feel that ROI can be manipulated to include / exclude the projects that people want to move forward with. Issues in ROI did not start in the realm of social media – egregious hourly rates used in ABC costing and cost avoidance phantoms have plagued many.

(Credit)

It’s fine to track the path to sale of social media users on your website. And that may get you a pretty straight answer to ROI. I really don’t have time to write that kind of post for you right now. Plus, I prefer to write in a stream of consciousness; that’s just how I roll.

Here’s my spin on the value of social media:

I trust a company more because they relate to me on a medium I prefer.

Let’s break that out a bit:
Trust - repeat customer, bigger ticket, repeat business, one who refers others.
More – than the other company that has no clue.
Relate – human to human contact. Please don’t make me say “representative” again on your crappy IVR.
Me – you know, that elusive demographic you’ve been coveting.
Medium I prefer – social media. And not necessarily just Twitter.

What’s your take on the great social media ROI debate? Let me know in the comments.

App-stur-ba-tion (noun) – The overabundance of applications that don’t fulfill any new, meaningful purpose.

Lately, I’ve seen several of the social media thought leadership embracing personal iPhone applications that turn out to be  nothing more than their own blogs.  While at first this seemed like a really cool idea to me (think: wow, I really should get that and recommend others do the same), the more I thought about it, the more I realized just how inane having such an application really is.

Let’s face it — while many out there have very good advice and tips, why does it make sense for individual bloggers to have an iPhone app? What new features does such an app bring to the table that aren’t already present on the blog in question or its associated RSS feed?

Unless you’re a site that’s publishing many times a day, I see no valid reason for the implementation of such an app.  Even if you’re Techcrunch or Mashable, it’s probably better to just optimize your blog itself for the iPhone’s layout. After all, who really wants to download an application for every blog they are a frequent reader of? Viewing a site in Safari should serve just as well and keeps your iPhone from being cluttered or overburdened by excessive downloads.

(Image: textually.org)

(image credit: xyzzy)

What a year it has been for StumbleUpon.

First, having it break away from eBay (who’s been on a divestiture streak as it is, also recently spinning off Skype) and be repurchased by the original founders seems to be paying off.  Since then, we’ve seen:

• A new UI (in beta for a while and rolled out fully as of yesterday)
• Su.pr,  a url shortner that also allows you to schedule posts as well as excellent analytics

The latest SU innovation is the addition of new topics.  While this may not sound like much, it actually makes all the difference.  Let me explain.

Let’s say you were at your local library and you wanted to find books about cooking.  But wait … there is no cooking section! So, you have to go to a more generalized/unrelated section of the library (dining out? hobbies? food?) to find what you’re looking for.

And that’s exactly what has plagued Stumbleupon for so long.

Granted, part of the issue is that users aren’t typically librarians and really don’t know how to categorize things for the betterment of others.  Now, we as SU users have more options:

• Arts/History: Design, Photoshop, Quotes, Woodworking
• Commerce: Home Business, Luxury
• Computers: Facebook
• Hobbies: Crochet, Quilting, Scrapbooking
• Sci/Tech: Gadgets, Technology
• Society: Christmas

As far as social media goes, the noteworthy update in there is that you now can have an interest called Facebook.

Keep up the good work, StumbleUpon!  We appreciate it.

Even with the largest social networks, to me, it’s the little things that count.

Although I’m usually knee-deep in the latest toys of social media, I like LinkedIn.  Yes, you heard me.  For all the criticism that LinkedIn receives, I find it to be one of the most stable social sites, consistently growing, and abound with reliable information. But, back to the little things, the ones which really make Linkedin special to me.

Just yesterday I noticed an email update they had sent my way, offering an abbreviated insight into my networks recent activities. Something I just noticed (thanks to these Linkedin Updates!) is the ability to now “send congratulations” – a good idea and excellent addition to the site.

Now, every site  has things about a contact’s birthday, offering the options of sending them a quick gift or dropping them a message, but here LinkedIn capitalizes on its strengths by focusing on something entirely relevant to its network, letting you click through to a message congratulating your connection on their new position. It’s the kind of thing that stops you in your workflow tracks and makes you take action.

LinkedIn is finally getting with the program socially as well.  They have recently integrated with Twitter and opened their app platform to their developer network.   Expect good things from LinkedIn for 2010.

What are the little things in social media that you’ve noticed that have stuck out for you? Tell us in the comments.

Facebook just started adding an option for your brand pages to choose your audience visibility on  wall postings:

Fan page country and language choice

While this may seem like not that big a deal, think of the possibilities.  Users targeting multiple countries and languages can now have multi-purpose brand pages that can reach all, rather than making smaller, localized one-off versions of the brand page.

It will be interesting to see what direction Facebook goes with this functionality – imagine what you could do if it was brought to a city/state/region/mile radius level.  Would this challenge the Facebook Ad network too much? We shall see.

In what may be the first of its kind in the social media world, the little used and subscribed Football (/r/football) subreddit of Reddit.com was overthrown by the Soccer (/r/soccer) subreddit. Though things seem to have died down, yesterday’s events can only be described as a social media coup.

The argument over “Football” and “Fútbol” will go on for eternity, but I never expected it lead to this. The thuggish Redditors (we’re teasing of course) from the disgruntled Soccer subreddit began their barrage yesterday evening, submitting every link relevant to their sport they could find while simultaneously down-voting any stories relevant to Handegg. With only 143 members frequenting the Football subreddit and Soccer’s laying claim to more than 1,500, it was a quick rout. I mean, honestly, we Americans shouldn’t expect the fans of the world’s most popular sport to rename Fútbol in order maintain its distinction from our own Football. As a commenter on Reddit mentioned, perhaps we should just learn to pronounce their sport with the accent and the affronted /r/soccer subscribers should get in touch with user carlosmiguelp, the lone and inactive moderator of the Futbol subreddit.

Speaking of moderators, this never would have happened if the moderator for the Football subreddit had been around to man his post. He’s another inactive user. This brings up a serious issue: Should Reddit ultimately have some power over its user-created subreddits? An ability to pass on moderator duties in instances like these? We’ll do some investigating as there are certainly plenty of subreddits with defunct moderators, open to some form of gaming or manipulation, not just the Football subreddit. Reddit should take some moderation measures and start governing the few mishaps like these. It would give dead subreddits like Football a chance to thrive while also protecting them from manipulation and containing content unintended for inclusion by their absentee creators.

Some of you may have noticed a new Twitter Retweet logo marking your friends’ RT’s. Since users, the originators of the term, have been utilizing “RT” (followed by the author’s @name) almost as long as Twitter’s been around, and applications such as Tweetdeck and Seesmic implemented the feature long ago, what took Twitter so long in adding such a simple and necessary feature? This is something I would have expected to be released prior to Twitter Lists.

Let’s just assume they wanted to take their time, ensuring they didn’t leave anything out. From our initial impression, it looks as if they didn’t. The Twitter developers were sure to include a retweet counter and smartly prevented users from editing the original tweet. I’m sure you’re all eagerly awaiting your opportunity to give it try.

Update: looks like Twitter has pulled Retweets for now.

I remember when Plurk first came out.  At first glance its user interface was different but once you got to spending some time on the site, it was pretty cool.  As luck would have it, Plurk also came around when Twitter was having some of its worst downtime in history.  Take that, and some nifty enhanced features (conversations on one page, ability to share images and video, dancing bananas and it seemed as though Plurk really could have taken over the microblogging space.

But it didn’t.

Why? I would offer that Plurk ultimately didn’t listen to its community.  Perhaps the dealbreaker for me and others was the fact about not making karma optional.  The nature of many on the social web is to be competitive, and Plurk gave us a forum for this.  The more active you are, the more karma you received.  However, if there was a period of time that you were inactive (say, you had a holiday, a weekend, religious reasons, etc) you would actually lose karma.  A number of people brought this up, but Plurk stood firm, saying that if you didn’t want to see karma on your profile, you could just hide it out with a different page design.  That’s a band-aid to the problem.

I was thinking about keeping quiet over this situation, that is, until I received an email from Plurk last week talking about the Plurk activity I’ve missed for the week.  After seeing this, I chatted with Teeg, a friend of mine and still staunch supporter of Plurk.  She said that she didn’t get the email! This is a community fail on the part of Plurk to target the Plurkers that are not participating, rather than the ones that are.

So Plurk, I didn’t want to say it, but you’re doing it wrong: