We’ve been on a “leveraging social media to boost your brand” trend lately with our Weekend Reading series here at ReadWriteStart; we previously brought you Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crush It! and just last week we covered Butow and Bollwitt’s Blogging to Drive Business. This week we continue this trend and additionally narrow our focus to social networking with the latest book from author Clara Shih, The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff.

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“Online social networks are fundamentally changing the way we live, work and interact,” the back cover of the book touts. “They offer businesses immense opportunities to transform customer relationship for profit: opportunities that touch virtually every business function, from sales and marketing to recruiting, collaboration to executive decision-making, product development to innovation.”

Author Clara Shih worked previously for both Microsoft and Google before creating Faceconnector, an early Facebook application for businesses. When she’s not writing books on using social networking to build better businesses, Shih directs the product line of AppExchange, a marketplace for third-party SAAS business apps run by Salesforce.

The first third of Shih’s book provides a basic background history of social media online, from the first networks of the early days of the World Wide Web to today’s powerhouses like Facebook, the book’s namesake. Shih believes that three factors helped separate Facebook from the herd of social networking sites: trusted identity, exclusivity and the news feed. Facebook has become a trusted directory because users display their real name that in the early days was verified by having a valid university email address. These addresses also clearly placed users into a network making the site feel better organized instead of creating a service wide free-for-all. Though restrictions on networks and university email addresses have been lifted, the sense of “trusted identity” still prevails on Facebook.

In the second part of the book, Shih breaks down how Facebook and social networking is “transforming the way we do business” with topics like using Facebook as a CRM and recruiting online. One suggestion she has for building an online business is to find inspiration from real-time trend feeds.

“By investing in building out entrepreneurial networks on social networking sites that cut across different homogeneous networks, product managers can increase the chances they will be exposed to radically new thinking,” writes Shih.

Shih then provides a “step-by-step guide for using Facebook for business” in the last portion of her book. Among these steps is engaging the audience, delivering your message and building customer relationship through continued interaction. Strangely, though, Shih suggests that businesses only need to be be in the habit of using Facebook “at least once a week,” which seems like a low goal to aim for. As we learned from previous books, building a loyal audience on the Web requires tenacity and a frequent online presence. Once a week will suffice for some, but the real game changers are interacting with their customers daily.

Web savvy readers may find The Facebook Era to be less for them and more for the inexperienced Web user looking for a crash course in online social marketing. The book is heavily sales oriented, as is to be expected from an author with Shih’s backround, but does provide some healthy insights for the average entrepreneur. Coming in right around 200 pages, this book is a little longer than some of the book’s we’ve previously recommended, but a deep index will help you find exactly what you’re looking for.

Disclosure: A review copy of the book The Facebook Era was provided to ReadWriteWeb by Pearson Education, Inc.

Photo by Flickr user Gauldo.

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In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week – we report on President Obama’s (non)-use of Twitter, take a look at the past decade in the media industry, review the latest statistics about blogging, question if Oxford Dictionary should’ve chosen "unfriend" as its word of the year, and more. We also check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

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Web Trends

Obama: "I Have Never Used Twitter"

Barack Obama spoke to a group of Chinese students this week at a town hall in Shanghai. The meeting was streamed live, worldwide on the Whitehouse website and on the Whitehouse’s Facebook page. He was asked a limited number of questions by the audience and one was about Twitter, which has been blocked in China since July. President Obama has never used Twitter, despite his account being the most followed there.

Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Democratization of News Media

It’s November 2009 and we’re nearing the end of a decade. It’s been a tumultuous time of change for many industries, much of it driven by the Internet. The newspaper industry has been particularly affected by the Web. Over the past 10 years, news media has undergone a seachange akin to the invention of the printing press in 1440.

How Blogging Has Changed Over The Last 3 Years (Stats)

Reader engagement with blogs has changed dramatically over the last three years, primarily because of the rise of online social networks, according to new numbers released by analytics firm Postrank. Postrank published an analysis based on metrics for signals like comments, trackbacks, shared links and online bookmarks for the top 1000 most-engaging feeds online and for 100,000 randomly selected blog posts in each year since 2007.

Unfriending: Are People Online Shedding Friends? (Debate)

The New Oxford American Dictionary announced its Word of the Year this week. Its selection? unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook. Has Oxford Dictionary made the right selection? ReadWriteWeb’s Founder Richard MacManus thinks not. Marshall Kirkpatrick disagrees with him. Both make their cases in this post and invite you to cast your vote in a poll.

The Top 10 Mobile Applications of 2012

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise, devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ and using social software inside organizations.

Google Sites Offers Templates; Claims It’s Easier Than Sharepoint

Google Sites is getting an upgrade. Starting this week, Google will provide templates that make it possible for users with no technical background to create web sites with a degree of functionality that includes page layouts, adding links for navigation and embedded gadgets. Templates are available for intranets, project sites, team sites, employee profile pages and other sites that people would use within the enterprise.

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

Future of Music Coalition’s Brian Zisk: The Do’s of Streaming Music

In 2008 the idea of another subscription-only music service was enough to get your knickers in a torrent. Sure Rhapsody was doing well, but they’d been around for forever and in 2008, freemium was the music model du jour. With a year to reflect, co-founder of the Future of Music Coalition and longtime San Fran Music Tech Summit organizer Brian Zisk tells us what it takes to survive in today’s music environment.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

The Google Chrome OS Press Event

Google held a press event this week outlining more details about its Google Chrome OS. Google plans to launch Chrome OS next year. Google is positioning Chrome OS as "just a browser" – that is, all of your data is in the cloud. Chrome OS will be focused on speed, simplicity, security; every application on Chrome OS will be a web application. Google sees Chrome OS as targeting 3 trends: netbooks, cloud (everything is a web app today), phones getting computing capabilities.

Twitter.com Is Still the Most Popular Twitter Client – TweetDeck a Distant Second

Twitter’s own homepage is still the most popular tool for users to update their status on Twitter. Around 46% of all updates are made directly on the site. Social media analytics and monitoring service Sysomos analyzed 500 million tweets it collected over the past 5 months and found that TweetDeck is the most popular third-party client. TweetDeck has a comfortable lead with a 8.48% share of the market, followed by Tweetie, Twitterific and Seesmic.

A Central Nervous System for Earth: HP’s Ambitious Sensor Network

HP Labs has joined the race to build an infrastructure for the emerging Internet of Things. The giant computing and IT services company has announced a project that aims to be a "Central Nervous System for the Earth" (CeNSE). It’s a research and development program to build a planetwide sensing network, using billions of "tiny, cheap, tough and exquisitely sensitive detectors."

Microsoft Launches Pivot, A Radically New Visualization of Online Objects

Microsoft Live Labs’ latest creation has just launched. Pivot is a fun, powerful discovery tool, built on Seadragon and powered by Silverlight, that runs in Vista or Windows 7 with IE8. It looks impressive and allows for truly intuitive exploration of information.

Droid Becomes Fastest-Selling Android Phone to Date

The Motorola Droid is the newest smartphone on the market to compete for the iPhone’s crown. Released by Verizon Wireless on November 6th, the Droid’s advertising campaign has been a full-frontal attack on the popular Apple smartphone with a heavy focus on what the iPhone doesn’t do. “iDon’t run simultaneous apps, iDon’t have a real keyboard, iDon’t take 5-megapixel pictures,” taunts Verizon’s Droid ad.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

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Reader engagement with blogs has changed dramatically over the last three years, primarily because of the rise of online social networks, according to new numbers released by analytics firm Postrank today. Postrank published an analysis based on metrics for signals like comments, trackbacks, shared links and online bookmarks for the top 1000 most-engaging feeds online and for 100,000 randomly selected blog posts in each year since 2007.

The numbers paint a stark picture: blogging has changed, but the blogging scene is in some ways in better shape than it was three years ago.

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The big picture is that total engagement with online content is growing, on-site engagement is declining in significance as off-site engagement like link sharing on social networks grows. Surprisingly, this off-site link sharing has also extended the lifespan of content.

Highlights from the report include the following:

• Total reader engagement has grown 30% year over year or 69% total for the top 1,000 feeds, which includes blogs and mainstream news sites.

For 100,000 randomly selected blog posts in each of 2007, 2008 and 2009…

• Engagement on-site has grown in absolute terms but the share of total engagment that happens on-site vs. off-site has dropped 50%.
• Trackbacks have fallen from 19% of engagement to 3% of engagement.
• Engagement on social networks like but not limited to Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook has grown from 1% to over 29% of total engagement. The Postrank staff admitted that this was a surprisingly low number but said that in aggregate there is still a whole lot of activity going on outside social networks.

• Segmenting from the last amount of effort required up to the most, reader engagement now looks like this: 29% is link-sharing on social networks, 29% is bookmarking or voting on sites like Delicious, Digg and Reddit, 38.5% is comments on or off-site and trackbacks are now 3% of engagement. “Trackbacks are taking a nose dive,” Postrank CTO Ilya Grigorik told us by phone, “bookmarking sites have consistently gone down over the last 3 years, but voting on sites like Digg or Reddit has grown.”
• Perhaps most significantly, blog posts now have a longer life span. In 2007 tracked posts saw 94% of engagement within the first day and 98% of that first day’s engagement happened within the first hour. In 2008 that number fell to 83% within the first day and in 2009 it was a mere 64%. Thus Postrank concludes that 36% of reader engagement in the top blogs happens after 1 day. “While the real-time web is all about lowering the latency,” Grigorik says, “the pervasive nature and number of people engaged in their communities and conversations (the Social Web) is helping with information discovery. People are worried that the real-time web will destroy their readership as everyone just gets distracted by the newest shiny thing on Twitter, but the numbers show something very different. It’s so easy to spread information now that it lasts longer and finds more niches – this trend is helping content travel further.”

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Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski, grad student and professor at Harvard Business School, examined a random sample of 300,000 Twitter users and discovered an interesting phenomenon. Though women outnumber men on the microblogging site, men have more followers and are twice as likely to follow a man than a woman.

Women make up 55 percent of Twitter users, according to the sample, and both sexes are likely to follow the same number of people. But it’s not exactly a classic boys-versus-girls or good-ole-boy scenario, however. Women are 25 percent more likely to follow a man than another woman.

Interestingly, though it’s been said women talk more than men and men use technology more than women, neither sex tweets more than the other, so aside from women outnumbering men on the site, it’s not a matter of message volume.

These results are rather baffling to the study’s authors. “These results are stunning given what previous research has found in the context of online social networks,” they write. “On a typical online social network, most of the activity is focused around women – men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, and women follow content produced by women they know.”

A few other interesting findings from the study:

• The median number of lifetime tweets per user is one.
• On average, over half tweet less than once every 74 days.
• The top 10% of Twitters produce 90% of the tweets.