As our digital and physical lives blur further, the internet has become the information hub where people spend a majority of their time learning, playing and communicating with others globally. Staying connected is more important than ever. If you are not participating in Social Media, you really need to rethink your strategy.

Sometimes it is easy to lose sight of just how staggering the numbers are of people collaborating, researching, and interacting on the web.

I thought it might be fun to take a step back and look at some interesting/amazing social media, Web 2.0, crowdsourcing and internet statistics.  I tried to find stats that are the most up-to-date as possible at the time of publishing this post.

The numbers presented below should be a close representation of today’s numbers (please correct me in the comments if you find more recent numbers somewhere and I’ll update).

Let’s break them down by section:

Google search stats:

1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) - approximate number of unique URLs in Google’s index (source)

2,000,000,000 (two billion) – very rough number of Google searches daily (source)

$110,000,000 – approximately amount of money lost by Google annually due to the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button (source)

24,400 – number of people employed by Google (December, 2008)

68,000,000 – the average number of times people Googled the word Google each month for the last year (source:  keyword tool)

$39.96 - the average cost per click for the phrase “consolidation of school loans” in AdWords (source:  keyword tool)

1,430,000 - the number of Google results for “Robert Scoble”

136,000 - the number of Google results for “Admiral Ackbar”

Wikipedia stats

2,695,205 - the number of articles in English on Wikipedia

684,000,000 – the number of visitors to Wikipedia in the last year

75,000 - the number of active contributors to Wikipedia

10,000,000 – the number of total articles in Wikipedia in all languages

260 – the number of languages articles have been written in on Wikipedia

(source)

YouTube stats

70,000,000 – number of total videos on YouTube  (March 2008)

200,000 – number of video publishers on YouTube (March 2008)

100,000,000 – number of YouTube videos viewed per day (this stat from 2006 is the most recent I could locate)

112,486,327 – number of views the most viewed video on YouTube has (January, 2009)

2 minutes 46.17 seconds – average length of video

412.3 years – length in time it would take to view all content on YouTube (March 2008)

26.57 - average age of uploader

13 hours – amount of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute

US $1.65 billion in Google stock – amount Google Inc. announced that it had acquired YouTube for in October 2006

$1,000,000 – YouTube’s estimated bandwidth costs per day

(sources here, here and here)

Blogosphere stats

133,000,000 – number of blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002

346,000,000 – number of people globally who read blogs (comScore March 2008)

900,000 – average number of blog posts in a 24 hour period

1,750,000 – number of RSS subscribers to TechCrunch, the most popular Technology blog (January 2009)

77% - percentage of active Internet users who read blogs

55% – percentage of the blogosphere that drinks more than 2 cups of coffee per day (source)

81 - number of languages represented in the blogosphere

59% – percentage of bloggers who have been blogging for at least 2 years

source

Twitter stats

1,111,991,000 – number of Tweets to date (see an up to the minute count here)

9,000,000 – number of Tweets/day(March 2000) (from TechCrunch)

86,078 – number of followers of the most active Twitter user (@kevinrose)

63% – percentage of Twitter users that are male (from Time)

Facebook stats

200,000,000 – number of active users

100,000,000 - number of users who log on to Facebook at least once each day

170 - number of countries/territories that use Facebook

35 - number of different languages used on Facebook

2,600,000,000 – number of minutes global users in aggregate spend on Facebook daily

100 – number of friends the average user has

700,000,000 – number of photos added to Facebook monthly

52,000 – number of applications currently available on Facebook

140 - number of new applications added per day

source

Digg stats

236,000,000 – number of visitors attracted annually by 2008 (according to a Compete survey)

56% - percentage of Digg’s frontpage content allegedly controlled by top 100 users

124,340 - number of stories MrBabyMan, the number one user, has Dugg (see updated number here)

612 - number of stories from Cracked.com that have made page 1 of Digg (see all 41 pages of them here)

36,925 – number of Diggs the most popular story in the last 365 days has received (see story here)

We all need to stay connected.  The numbers are staggering. Maybe now you can see why social media is important for you to be working in.

This post is a reposted from http://thefuturebuzz.com. Used with permission.

The Social Media/SEO game just keeps changing. Recently Google launched Google Profiles.

I can here you now, another social media profile to manage, ugh. But take a minute and be smart, Google will rank these higher than Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. No one knows the long term viability of social media sites but one thing for certain, Google is not going anywhere soon. I coach all my clients to do social media as a strategy for SEO in Google. The good news is you can post links to all your sites on a Google Profile.

If you don’t have a Google Profile, get one. SEO is SEO.

Most everyone walking the planet over 16 years old has seen the popular late night talk shows.  In nearly every country, people flock to these late night shows. The format is the same and very popular. The shows start with a monologue from the host, normally laced with social commentary laced with humor and wit. After the opening monologue, the show flips to a interview format where a dialogue takes place between the host and guests.

Marketing types should learn from this successful format now that internet and mobile communications now facilitate dialogue better than ever.

The days of monologue marketing, media and communication are gone. We see evidence of this with the global struggle of the newspaper industry and various medias that used to primarily were monologue delivery systems. The papers and media created the content, controlled it’s distribution and basically had control.  There was no two way communication, it was all monologue.

Democratization of content and influence is here. Anyone person or organization can create a groundswell using social media. Now that mobile communications have become affordable for the masses and social media platforms are all the rage, you must provide your prospects access to you in formats that support a dialogue.

Questions to ask your organization:

1. Does your marketing message invite people to be taught, not told?
2. Do you deliver the education to your customers need to buy from you in a manner which can be consumed and not feel like a sales pitch? Does your communication delivery include automated drip systems?
3. Does your website invite communication, not just a a digital brochure? Have you integrated video and chat into your online presence?
4. Are you actively using social media? If so, how effectively?
5. Are you monitoring your brand in social media and responding to what is being said?
6. Do customers, partners and prospects have access to your firm 24/7 in a self service format? Remember, customers buy when they are ready to buy and not when you are ready to sell.

If you are truly going to gain and maintain an Attention Connection with your desired stake holders, you must be relevant and connected. You can not be a stand up talk show host that just delivers a  monologue. You must seek to have dialogue.

What do you think? How do you grade your organization in the delivery and sustaining in a dialogue?

As always, connect with you later.

Social media in an interesting paradox. With the global reach of the internet and the ability to “headline read” through streams, social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and the other 250,000 plus platform sites, one can stay connected yet be a observer at the same time.

I am now connected to thousands of people and if I choose, I can reach out and digitally connect with any of them at my disposal. The connection is global, no longer I am restricted to an isolated world of one local community.

Powerful tools and truly astonishing if you think the democratization of media, influence, advertising and opinion.

Like anything else in this life, you will only get out of social media what you put into it. Like a plant, if your network is not watered and nourished, it will shrivel up and die.

Those who want to leverage the power of the network, need to water their social gardens on a regular basis.

I was with a small business owner yesterday and he clearly has not become educated on the power of social media yet but is smart enough to jump in and start. He told me in the meeting that someone asked him why his company was on Twitter, Facebook and MySpace and he told them frankly, ” I am not sure yet, but these are the current platforms of communication and I better stay connected”.

Stay connected. Water your network each day.

As always, connect with you later.

For many people who have not made steps to use social media and automation to make money yet, they may be standing around scratching heads saying how do I do this?

It’s not that hard and here is a real live case study of social media at work.

My high school classmate is the manager of Cisero’s ( non Facebook Link) in Park City, Utah. I had not been in touch with this classmate in more than 20 years and Facebook was the connection.

Like most small businesses in the restaurant and nightclub business, they really did not have much more than a website that was a couple of pages of brochure ware.

About four months ago with prodding from a marketing friend (me) Cisero’s management  ventured out and put up Facebook page for the establishment.

Each week Cisero’s post the specials and announce events through Facebook broadcasts.  I get the notifications.

Now here is the take home message. I don’t live near Park City, I live in the Denver area. However, I do travel to Utah on business on a regular basis and the next time I am in Park City, I will be eating at Ciseros’. Why, because they have remained top of mind with me by simply keeping me in the loop.

There are dozens of options of places to eat in Park City but Cisero’s is my next stop because they are in my mind because they have stayed in touch.

This is a great example of low cost, high touch value of social media. The cost to set up the Facebook page, 15 minutes of time. The cost to transmit the message… another 5 minutes. Hard costs… well, zero.

Compare this cost to stay top of mind with me, a man who lives out of state? Printing, mailing, emailing, calls, TV ads… you get the picture.

Social media is powerful and you should be using it today.

As I always say; to get attention, you must pay attention.

Connect with you later.

Twitter, Facebook, My Space, email, text, mms,video broadcast,podcast, blackberry, iphone, chat, blog,…. Pick your poison…

“A message came back from the great beyond
There’s fifty-seven channels and nothin’ on’ - Bruce Springsteen

I see the value of the social media tools but it just reminds me of the 1992 Bruce Springsteen song, 57 channels and nothin’ on’. Remember the simple days when we thought cable TV was overwhelming amount of content? That funny little brown box on top of your TV set and you had to dial in the channel. Hey Billy, spin the dial to the cool new sports channel… What is an ESPN?

57 channels and nothin’ on’

ESPN at 2 in the morning used to feature table tennis. Now I have hundreds I follow and followers on Twitter and it seems like 57 channels and nothin’ on’ multiplied by exponential values.

The information glut is on more than ever. The  land rush to the social media tools to stay connected is absolutely crazy. Drinking from a fire hose, sticking your head out the window doing 100 mph, what ever analogy you want to use. Now we are being overwhelmed with streams.  The more connected you are today with the more tools you use, the stream grows from a trickle to a flow to a rush to the damn amazon river of data rushing at you.

All I want is to be connected. Hyper conneted to some, hmmm… well, maybe. Over connected, turn it off.

57 channels and nothin’ on’…. crank it up, let it breath. yep, 57 channels and nothing on.

57 channels and nothin’ on’

57 channels and nothin’ on’

57 channels and nothin’ on’

Connect with you later.