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Facebook turned 6 earlier this month, but what does that mean in numbers?

Facebook was launched on February 4, 2004 and has come a long way from a Harvard-only networking site in the intervening years. In fact, Facebook has undoubtedly become the world’s largest social network, with over 400 million users worldwide and more than 900 employees. Let’s take a closer look at what kinds of numbers and user activity this growth translates to.

Check out the infographic and don’t forget to digg it!

Technorati Tags: mashable, facebook, social media

Thanks to everyone that voted for me in Invesp’s annual top 100 marketers poll. I was at #94 on their list last year and moved up to #43 this year.

Technorati Tags: online marketing, blogging, social media, social media marketing

It’s that time of the year again and I’m very excited to be heading off to BlogWorldExpo 2009! If you’re also going to the conference, please get in touch with me because I would love to party with you while I’m in Vegas. All of my contact information is on my contact page.

Here are the panels that I will be on, followed by the sessions I’m looking forward to attending. If you think I missed a good one, please let me know.

My sessions (Friday October 16)

12:45pm - 1:45pm (Room 230) ROI Smackdown: New Media versus Traditional Media

3:00pm - 3.30pm (Room 231) Building a Sustainable Online Community

4:00pm - 5:00pm (Live Podcasting Area) Live with The Drill Down Crew

The sessions I will be attending (please click to enlarge)

Technorati Tags: blogworld, blogworldexpo, social media

It took a little over a month to get everything in place but I’m very excited to finally announce that I have just accepted the amazing opportunity to head social media strategy at ChicagoNow! In case you’re wondering what we’re all about, our editorial director Tracy describes it succinctly as “Huffington Post meets Facebook for Chicago”.

We’re blessed with fantastic leadership and a well-rounded team of community managers and bloggers who are passionate about Chicago and everything it has to offer. So please stop by, register on the site, and don’t forget to tell us how we’re doing and how we can improve.

ChicagoNow is a new place for Chicagoans to connect and share their interests with each other.

We think of it as an online town square for the Chicago of right now–the city that gave the world a president and may host the world for an Olympics.

We’ve quickly grown from a handful of blogs to almost 70 blogs and are looking forward to welcoming many more into the ChicagoNow family (if you think you could be one of our future superstars, or would like to partner/collaborate with us, don’t hesitate to get in touch). Finally, we’re less than a week away from taking the beta sticker off the site so please drop by and take a look, we’re confident that you’ll fall in love.

Hey everyone, wanted to announce that Tip’d, our socially driven community for financial news, ideas, and tips has turned 2.0. Please drop by the blog to check out all the changes.

Also, read more coverage: Mashable, Read/WriteWeb, The Huffington Post, Soshable, The Lost Jacket and Tropical SEO.

I’ve written a guest post at Mashable taking a look at Digg’s latest and arguably best update offering to date.

All in all, while the DiggBar is certainly an improvement for the end-user, with one release, Digg is positioning themselves in the center of some of the hottest growth markets at the moment and at the same time protecting their core function of content sharing by taking a little focus off the destination site. As usage of the DiggBar increases, they’ll piggyback on content sharing via social networks and microblogging sites as well as corner a very nice chunk of the url-shortner market while increasing the engagement on Digg, without even having people visit the destination site.

read the article.

Technorati Tags: digg, twitter, diggbar, social media, social news, microblogging

I’ve written a guest post at Mashable taking a look at the blogosphere’s reaction to Eric Bauman and his team being ousted from eBaum’s and comparing the site’s position to to larger video sites

Ultimately do we hate one because a smaller group of people is infringing on the copyright of small, independent content creators while the other is a platform that enables hundreds of thousands of users to infringe on the copyrights of large corporations?

read the article. (and don’t forget to digg and stumble the original link)

Technorati Tags: ebaum’s world, youtube, mashable, social media, social news, online video

I have accepted a position of Senior Editor for Social Media with Search Engine Marketing Journal and am thrilled to be working alongside Brent Csutoras.

The goal of the journal is to help professionals in the industry share and demonstrate their expertise. We are different from a magazine in that we encourage the submission of articles and research papers by experts in the industry. Similar to a scientific journal, we review articles submitted by industry professionals and our editors decide if the article will be published in our journal.

If you would like to have your paper considered by the journal please review the requirements and submit it for review.

Technorati Tags: social media, social news, semj

I’ve written a guest post at Mashable disecting the anatomy of a revolt and analyzing Hulu CEO’s response to the community and the lessons learned from the response.

However, the lessons to be learned here are immensely important and it would be a severe injustice to yourself as an entrepreneur, your community, and your investors, if you don’t learn from Hulu’s mistake and Kilar’s response memo.

read the article. (and don’t forget to digg and stumble the original link)

Technorati Tags: mashable, social media, revolt, social news, social networking, microblogging, digg, facebook, twitter, hulu

I’ve written a guest post at the Kissmetrics blog discussing some of the most important conversion metrics you should be monitoring.

There are hundreds of different ways you can increase retention and conversions, but before you do that, you have to figure out what metrics you should be trying to improve.

To that end, here’s a cheat sheet that will help you determine the most important metrics to track.

Head over to the Kissmetrics blog to check it out.

Technorati Tags: blogging, make money online, e-commerce, conversion, optimization