I was asked at a recent event where we presented if I could share statistics on the growth of blogging and social media. Here are some numbers on overall size, language breakdown, visits and advertising.

Blogosphere growth is still strong. The state of the blogosphere from David Sifry shows that Technorati track 57 million blogs and 55% are active. They define active as a posting in the last three months. This is not all blogs but the growth percentages are representative.

The mix of languages is interesting with nearly 40% being in English and one third in Japanese. They do give a proviso that their numbers on language wildly underestimate the Korean language and they do not index Skyblog which is a very large French platform for bloggers.

Advertising spend in social media is growing and increased by 145% last year. The relative numbers are small but upside is large. The number of web visits that go to a social media site is 1 in 20. This for me is the most interesting trend and is a sign that the advertising revenues will continue to grow as advertising to this space gets more targeted.

We recently recorded an eMarketing webinar with ZN and Bulldog solutions. The webinar is introduced by Bulldog VP Koen DeWitte and we share our thoughts about eMarketing and blogs, Phil Weiss managing director of ZN presented his 7 tips for eMarketing success and I give an overview of how brands are impacted by social media (blogosphere, forums) and what can be done about this. Please feel free to give me feedback on the event…

Tracking conversations across blogs, forums, review sites and other user generated media has spawned a new industry. We are apart of this and use tools to quantify these conversations for brands. Brands take this seriously now as they see that they often cede control of how they are discussed. Forrester do a nice piece on how previously companies could control what was said in the small number of TV channels, news publications and other media that existed 10 years ago. Today a fractured media and new forums arriving every day has blown this control away.

It is interesting but there is an over emphasis on how if companies engage with social media they can prevent the negatives happening i.e. Dell Hell, L’Oreal Flog, and Kryptonite fiasco (?). The message seems to be if you monitor and measure this area or generally get involved bad things won’t happen quite as much…

What about the positives? Frankly they are commonplace. I think perhaps it is just not as “selling” to talk to companies about how Microsoft have softened their image and increased customer advocacy by engaging with bloggers. Loic LeMeur was pretty much unknown before becoming a commentator on blogs and actually creating content for the blogosphere, this benefits him but also his employer, Six Apart. Would Youtube have been as successful without the millions of conversations on the web? Personally, (obviously) I am sold on this and the examples impact not only key individuals but companies too.

It may not matter what entices companies to get engaged with these media but it is clear the benefits are more than just preventing an avalanche of customer criticism! Of course then the question is, how best to engage, I will do a follow up post on this and reference a webinar that we recorded with ZN and Bulldog which talks goes through this topic area.

The restaurant will be Strofilia in Brussels near Place St. Catherine. Dinner is at 19.30pm. If you are interested to come there is still time to drop me a comment on the blog, it’s a really nice group coming.

Tom Raftery is presenting at Microsoft in Brussels on Friday. He was asking if anyone from the Belgian blog community would like to have a dinner with him afterwards and I said I would organise this. This will mean a cheap but lovely restaurant in the centre of Brussels :). I promise to have the place sorted out by tomorrow and if anyone would like to join please leave a comment on the blog. Dinner is this Friday (the 17th of November) at 19.30.

From my experience, Tom is a nice guy and a very popular Irish blogger/podcaster. I really like that he is very honest about the wide range of new technologies out there and not scared to publish his dissatisfaction about his negative experiences. He also writes passionately about business blogging and the dearth of it in Ireland. The blog is definitely worth a read…

The chosen area was the connection of leading food brands, both manufacturer and services to childhood obesity. This has been motivated by the incredible amount of conversations that are generated in this area in blogs and news and of course the amount of this buzz that is connection to company brands. For those that are interested please email us at buzzreport@attentio.com and we will send through a copy. So you know what you are getting, it is a PowerPoint presentation with 18 pages and the brands discussed are Pepsi, Kraft, Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Unilever, P&G, Danone, Kellogg’s and Nestle. From our sample survey over 23 days of observation in blogs, the brand that is most frequently mentioned in connection to Childhood obesity are Pepsi, Kellogg’s, Pizza Hut and McDonalds. McDonald’s is a brand connected to Childhood obesity twice as much as the next brand Pepsi. Perhaps it is no surprise that this is the case but the sample report is more about what the charts look like and how we show brand and topic proximity…