I AM AN EARLY LINKEDIN ADOPTER

I earned my bragging rights today for being an early adopter to LinkedIn. After announcing earlier this week that it passed the 100 million user mark, professional networking site LinkedIn sent emails to its early users on Saturday, March 26, 2011 thanking them and telling them exactly when they joined.

I received my e-mail from LinkedIn Co-Founder and Chairman, Reid Hoffman on Saturday and although I was one of 1 million recipients I realized once again how dead on I was in predicting the social media phenomena. I happened to be member number 530915 in fact!* The email, signed by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman himself says “In any technology adoption lifecycle, there are the innovators, those who help lead the way. That was you.” This email also served as a reminder of how quickly social media spreads – in just a few years you can go from 1,000,000 followers to more than 100,000,000.

Starbucks beats all consumer brands on social media

Starbucks’ huge Facebook audience makes it the highest-ranking brand on social media, according to a ratings study done by London-based Famecount, a media measurement service that aggregates popularity across social media channels.

Coca-Cola pulled in second, but Famecount ranks it well behind Starbucks. Whole Foods came in at No. 3, based almost entirely on its 1.7 million followers on Twitter.

Ford Goes Zero to 60 on Social Media

Zero to 60: Ford’s Social Media Story, by Scott Monty; presented by GasPedal and the Social Media Business Council from GasPedal on Vimeo.

32% of Influential Churches in the U.S. are on Facebook

Social Networking is Shaping Religion Today

According to a survey Sojo recently conducted, 32% of the country’s most influential churches surveyed are using Facebook. Some of the churches surveyed included:

• World Changers Church International in College Park, Georgia
• Calvary Chapel of Ft Lauderdale
• North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Georgia
• Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky
• Second Baptist in Houston, Texas
• Word of Faith International Christian Church in Southfield, Michigan

Of the churches surveyed, 32% reported either having a Facebook page or group for their church or for its individual ministries. All 32% of the churches using Facebook stated that they initially started using Facebook as a means to connect with their Facebook-using members. Now, the top reasons for using this particular social network is still for connecting with members but has evolved as a tool for communicating important upcoming events and volunteer opportunities to members of the congregation that use Facebook. One church reported that they wanted to stay "relevent" to what its' youth in the congregation was using to communicate.

In this survey, junior high and high school membership averaged to be 1,063 members. Averages for college student and members in their early 20's were not applicable.

Two churches surveyed reported that their pastors had personal MySpace pages. MySpace and YouTube tied for being the second most used social networks among the churches we surveyed. Twitter, one of the fastest growing social networks right now, is currently only being used by 10% of the churches in Sojo's survey. Several churches mentioned they were looking into possibly jumping onto the Twitter bandwagon.

Surprisingly, only 10% stated they were using Tangle (originally GodTube.com), the world's largest faith and family-based social network with 550,000 registered users. And another 10% stated they were not using any form of social networks.

Below is a breakdown of the social networking sites revealed in our survey.

Social Media Sites: Who is on Them?

Here's a FUN look at who is on some of the more popular social media sites according to Cory O'Brien. This is by no means, scientific evidence.






Who else is on Facebook? We are! Find us on Facebook.