Mark Walsh talks about the growth of social media in different regions of the world. It is a common belief that the U.S. is a world leader in social media penetration - perhaps because both MySpace and Facebook were launched by Americans, but surprisingly enough, according to this article, countries like Brazil, Russia, Taiwan and Mexico experience a growth in online social network membership of more than 70% compared to less than 49% in the U.S. China, for one, has long since surpassed the U.S. at 43 million vs. 26.4 million in the number of people that have their own blog. The article also comments on the levels of active engagement in social media, the age and gender gaps, and notes that the fastest growing social media categories are watching online video, downloading podcasts, and subscribing to RSS feeds. Read the full article

A recent report from Nielsen//Netratings (2nd April 2008) says that the online ad industry had a 18.9% growth in the US in 2007. While overall advertising grew by only 0.6%, probably reflecting the overall state of the American economy, the online ad business has sky rocketed, which hints at a shift in ad spending from the traditional channels like TV, magazines, etc. towards online channels. As a last note, this article quotes a new Hitwise report that show an incredible increase in online video streaming of 178% in 2007. Read the full article

If you plan to start a company blog, this article has some great tips that'll help you get better results from your efforts. Taking a few minutes out of your schedule to familiarize yourself with the basics of blogging will pay off if you are concerned about your blog showing up on the search engines. With these tips you will be aware of possibilities you would have never thought of yourself, like making sure the URL of every post is keyword rich even though your blog post title may not be. Other tips are concerned with unique and varied content, blogging link strategies, and social networking with other bloggers. Read the full article

SEO can do a lot more than simply create visibility on the search engines and reputation management is one thing that can be done with the right SEO strategy. This article explains how you can use SEO for reputation management by driving bad press down in the search engine result pages. The most important steps to this method is identifying the keywords related to the bad press, and then, to counteract the negative press, build links to optimize brand and product names, because, as the article says, “SEO has a pivotal role in reputation management, as it can remove negatives and enhance positives on the first page of results, which is usually the only page that matters. Read the full article

As always when new digital opportunities arise, some marketers and companies are moving fast to be where the fun happens while most are sceptic and insecure as to the benefits of embracing this new opportunity. This article lists a number of reasons why you should want to make a Facebook Fan page for your company. Aside from the obvious benefit of branding and the ability to drive traffic to your website, you also get the opportunity to interact and communicate with your fans. Last but not least, creating a Facebook Fan page is free and its easy, and if you don’t you it, somebody else probably will, and then you won’t be in control. Read the full article