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I've been capturing the Twitter Public Timeline since late 2009.  I have now nearly 6 million records, each one containing the message, of course, but also the name of the user and their "Followers" and "Following" count at that point in time.  I started doing scatter plots of this data and was amazed at the detailed structure evident in the data, that illustrate some interesting ways in which Twitter is being used.  No single graph can show it all, so I'm giving you a series of charts, each one showing an area of the Following/Followers phase space 10ox larger.

Location based social network Foursquare celebrated 10 million registered users yesterday but how are businesses and organizations using the platform? I wrote a year ago next month about the incredible potential offered by Foursquare accounts for organizations: following a Foursquare page as a user is like opting-in to view the world through the lens of that organization's geo-annotations. It can be awesome. (My favorites? History Channel and Eater.) Are businesses getting into it? For one perspective on that question, I extracted some data from the 128 most recent Foursquare Pages that have been created. The 128 most recent Foursquare Page holders have added 728 tips in 311 cities so far. They've amassed a total of over 8,000 Foursquare followers and they came in with some social media experience as well: those organizations already had an aggregate of over 800,000 Twitter followers.

ChompOn has released some interesting findings (pdf) related to social media sharing and its value to e-commerce. Specifically, the firm sought out to answer the question: "What is the value of a social action in online commerce?"  What they came up with is that a Facebook Share was worth $14, a Facebook "like" was worth $8, a tweet was worth $5, and a Twitter follow was worth $2.

We've recently conducted surveys of the White House's Facebook fans and Twitter followers asking for their feedback on our online programs. Between the two surveys, we received thousands of responses and thought we'd share some of the results.

"The University of Michigan athletic department denied claims made Friday morning that it had been creating fake online personas -- also known as "catfishing" -- to lure its own student-athletes into fictitious relationships, following comments made during a speech by Michigan athletic director Dave Brandon."

"Australian-based collaboration design specialist Matt Cooperrider has begun to explore an idea that I think the GeekDad readership is more than well positioned to help with. As well as being one of those out-of-the-box thinkers and generally smart guys, Matt is also a role-player and geek at heart. He has begun a new project called Play to Decide which will research how role-playing games can be used to support organizations and communities in democratic decision-making and the collaboration that follows. "

Has email become the new fax machine? Thierry Breton, Atos Origin CEO and Chairman, would have you believe so. Following through with a promise made earlier this year to eliminate email use among company employees, Breton plans to move beyond email within the next eighteen months and initiate a communication policy based on instant messaging and social media sites. As Atos Origin is a major international information technology company, the decision to abandon email has the potential to influence other companies' methods of communication among employees.

what does "social" really mean? It's become a phonetic clue that whatever follows in speech is now connected, via the Internet, to a collaborative application. If that's even close to accurate, then as marketers we're way past "social media" as a thing to do. Instead, "social media" is firmly part of markets, customer tastes, and business innovation cycles. What's more, entire organizations are governed more by consensus than individual dictum.

The White House loves Twitter, and Twitter loves the White House. How much? Last year, they grew their audience by over one-third, adding another 650,000+ followers to their 2M+ base.

Let us face it; we, as humans, are selfish, individualists, and undoubtedly clinging to any privileges associated with power. Goodwill and sharing among peers follow Nielsen's principle, and most of us wouldn't even imagine acting differently unless oblig

It seems that the Enterprise 2.0 and eLearning community has recently discovered the idea of Value Networks. This concept has been around in the work of Verna Alee, Clayton Christensen, and many others for at least ten years. Christian Briggs, co-founder of SociaLens wrote a chapter about it in 2009, entitled "Web 2.0 Business Models as Decentralized Value Creation Systems" in the following book: http://www.springer.com/computer/swe/book/978-0-387-85894-4

If you didn't hear, yesterday Charlie Sheen joined Twitter. Today he very well may reach 1 million followers (as I type he's already passed the 900K mark). How did it happen?  Why all of a sudden did he wake up and decide it's Twitter time? And how was it that Charlie Sheen went from non-twitterer to hardcore twitterer overnight?  Short answer: he got a lot of help from a team of experts at Ad.ly, a small Beverly Hills start-up that focuses on celebrity endorsements via Facebook and Twitter.

The White House began their "office hours" today at 2 p.m. EST. They asked Twitter followers to submit questions about the debt debate using the hashtag #WHChat. As their last response, they took the opportunity to play the internet's oldest practical joke on a user (and catching the rest of us in the wake).

Social media provides companies with new opportunities for customer service, research and marketing (within reason of course), but most respondents to a survey of C-level executive conducted by Harris Interactive for Capgemini aren't yet sure how to harness social media. The results are part of Capgemini's Executive Outsourcing Survey, and follows the firm's launch of its social media management service. Harris surveyed 302 senior executives at Fortune 1000 companies. More than half say that social media is a part of their company's customer care operations, but 64% of those said that the marketing department is solely responsible for social media marketing. Most (74%) executives in the study were simply unsure how many employees are dedicated to customer care via the social Web.

Customer-orientation and vision need to complement each other in order to stimulate breakthrough innovation. A visionary approach is essential to secure long-term success as well as to provide truly differentiating offerings to the market. However, this vision cannot be defined in a vacuum without customer insights. These insights are gained through shifts in focus from solutions to needs and broad understanding of customer's context, andmarket majorities to minorities, i.e. unserved consumers with dedicated needs.This leads me to the following conclusion: Innovation based on needs of edge customers tends to result in higher likelihood of breakthroughs than involving average customers in solution development. When it comes to breakthrough innovation, a customer-centered vision seems to be indicated.

The customer-centered company needs to make its products interactive, train its people for co-creative dialogue, redesign its physical places for two-way interactions, and open up the architecture of its digital sites to other processes and content that the company doesn't control. Nike puts a sensor in its shoes that lets runners track their runs and has a web platform where exchange data with others. Starbucks encourages a dialogue across all its stakeholders through the highly popular mystarbucksidea.com website. 3M invites its B2B customersto co-create new products with its R&D people live in their corporate labs. Apple invites third parties to develop new applications for its iPhones, iPads, and iPods. Companies are generally unprepared for this transformation to experience co-creation. Most product development groups continue to design non-interactive products. Company people in call centers and company stores still generally follow company narratives. Most corporate IT departments and suppliers are trained in one-way project-management techniques incompatible with true engagement-platform development. Herein lies the transformational challenge customer experience managers will face as they become customer-experience co-creators.

Maeda acknowledges that he now understands that social media can only take you so far in redesigning leadership. All those great hopes for leading by blogging, tweeting, and emailing proved inadequate to the gritty business of persuading an actual living, breathing constituency to follow his direction.

"It turns out that while most people still talk about brands face to face, their conversations are informed by the Internet more than any other media source," she adds. And when they're online, users go to search sites more than any other. This is even more true afterconversations, especially those sparked by TV. People follow up by searching for more information and prices more than any other online activity, including social media.

Despite a shaky economy, many web companies are in hypergrowth.  This is reminiscent of the five-year period over a decade ago when companies like Amazon, Netscape, eBay, Yahoo, Google and PayPal were built. One challenge, which isn't new, is the battle for consumer attention.  If you're looking to grow your user base, is there a best way to cost-effectively attract valuable users?  I'm increasingly convinced the best way is by harnessing a concept called social proof, a relatively untapped gold mine in the age of the social web. What is social proof?  Put simply, it's the positive influence created when someone finds out that others are doing something.  It's also known as informational social influence.

The death toll in Egypt so far is over 300, with thousands wounded. Way to jump on a trending #hashtag to push your products, Kenneth Cole.

Oh, and in case you missed it, there is already a parody Kenneth Cole PR Twitter account at http://twitter.com/KennethColePR Hours after its creation, it already has 3,633 followers. Electric speed indeed.

Also of interest: http://twitter.com/#!/dacort/status/33303368441004033 Damon Cortesi posted a screenshot of the KC fan page activity.