Here’s a link to social network traffic reports by Nielsen Wire, courtesy of Jeremiah Owyang.  These are all still growing like the emerging markets they are (fast, in other words), with MySpace still king of the hill.  But MySpace is too big to grow fast (“mature” doesn’t seem right for it, somehow, but that’s the analogy to the stage of economic development for you).  Twitter is the growth leader, followed by tagged.com, Ning, and LinkedIn. Interesting tidbit on the network profiles:  Facebook, LinkedIn, and Reunion.com are most popular among visitors ages 25-34, 35-49, and 55-64, respectively.

A couple nice posts from Techcrunch here, outlining the Microsoft push into social networking (lots of money still sitting around since NOT buying Yahoo).  In this first one, Michael Arrington tells about how MSFT leveraged its user base in Windows Live Messenger (by FAR the biggest IM network) to jump start its social network at home.live.com by importing the profiles of the IM users.  Microsoft is apparently making an energetic attempt to lock in online users with a suite of online apps and web services to encourage more commitment to the brand and to get the viral push of the network.  Arrington followed up a couple days later (today, Nov 14) with a post that points at how MSFT used its connection at Facebook (remember that $240 million investment they made a while back?) to mine user information, including email addresses, to try to get more people enrolling on their new social network.  Is this in violation of Facebook’s privacy policy?  Microsoft wants to be invited to the party but they aren’t; so, they crash it. I will be very curious watching their shiny new social network evolve.

Marketing Vox has published a post describing Facebook’s new “engagement” advertising –  your ad shows up in the upper right sweet spot and asks the viewer to engage in something: become a fan, try your luck winning a prize, whatever. The kicker is that if you do respond to one of these ads, the fact of your response is sent to everyone in your network.  Will Facebook users want to get spammed by their friends?  Skeptically yours, Glenn.

As Ben tells me all the time, social networks are about, well, networking.  That is, participation by people in a group of friends or colleagues about something they share. So, if you want to set about intentionally to make this part of your marketing campaign, hoping for that viral payoff down the road, how do you go about it?  This post by Kimberly Krause Berg, one of the leading lights of the grassroots internet (a founder of Cre8asite), has a long list of good practices for participation in blogs, forums, social networks and all the online communities that form around some common interest.  Sort of Miss Manners for the networld.  And really good.

Scott Margenau sent me this link to Bryan Eisenberg’s post on using social media in marketing.  You should check out this article if you either think (a) social media is the obvious path to viral nirvana that will make piles of profits, or (b) you think (like I tend to do) that social media is hopelessly clumsy as a marketing tool. The article shows an easy understanding of how social media extend the online conversation we have with our customers — Cluetrain Manifesto again, folks — but that this empowerment of the customer is not a total barrier to marketing.  You just need to respect the media, participate appropriately, and let good things happen.  This is a tough sell to control freaks.

Howard Dean made a splash with web-based fundraising four years ago, but this election was astounding for Obama’s use of the Internet for organizing at the grass(net)roots. I am sure the pundits are all correct that politics has changed permanently because of this — we’ll see more and more effort devoted to netizens in the future.  Here’s a couple interesting articles on the phenomenon. First, a review of search queries as political election predictors:  using Google’s Insight, Aaron Goldman matches up queries as predictions against the actual outcomes of the election.  Next, see Christine Beardsell’s nice article on the explosion in the use of video in the recent election, including some very influential user generated content (remember will.i.am’s ‘yes we can’ video?).  Christine argues that the Internet by its nature will demand more transparency and honesty from candidates:  do you agree?

With all the buzz surrounding social media and mobile, this research from Exact Target is important. The nugget in the results is this:  even among teens, email is the preferred channel for marketing messages. The respondents tend to see social media and SMS as PERSONAL communication channels, and marketing in them is a turn off.  The research also indicates that the prime time for email marketing is morning, when people are dealing with the stuff in the inbox, and they give messages more time.  Later in the day, emails get only seconds of attention, if any.

Chris Brogan adds another  good post in his quest for 100 relevant posts on social media with this list of how to use Twitter in a business context.  Good stuff — as always, though, easier to read than do.

Most online marketers I know are obsessing over social networks and social media. How do we market our clients using these autonomous user-driven networks?  Here’s Chris Brogran’s Best Advice about Social Networking with a nice list of links to resources — it’s a start.

Here’s another worthwhile Techcrunch post, this time about how Twitter gets the Audience idea right. The post is by Gregor Hochmuth.

I have my own ideas about why Twitter works, but I’ll save them for another post. The one by Hochmuth gets to much the same point: In Twitter, you have connections to a known group of people, and you can get a message to them whenever you want to. No filtering, and no anonymity (at least in the public stream). Hochmuth’s post is a good analysis comparing Twitter with Facebook and Friendfeed as to how they connect with Audience. That’s an important idea for a marketer to think about.