Social Media July 2007 Statistics

ComScore released numbers pertaining to social networking's worldwide growth. Now, Nielsen/NetRatings' PR team has released its latest set of figures that track how quickly the top social-networking sites are growing. The results are divided into three different categories of social media: social networks, blogs (and blog platforms) and video sites.
Looks like LinkedIn stays red hot with 260% growth. Club Penguin who had a same 260% flew under my radar completelly since it's children network. But it's very interesting trend.

More social media for corporations in 2008

The good news is that over 90% of marketing departments are planning to incorporate a social media campaign at some level in 2008. The bad news is that over a third are yet to use social media tools in their organisation.
According to a survey, conducted by Lewis PR at PR Week's New Media Conference 75% of attendees are going to use a blog as a social media weapon in 2008, an increase of 50% compare to last year.
The number of companies planning to use social networking increased from 33% to over 70%.
Interesting to know that 25% of surveyed marketers are currently setting no marketing budget aside for new media projects. But they're planning to do so in the future:
by 2009 up to 66% of marketers will set aside up to 25% of their budgets on social media spend.
The primary goal 85% of attendees trying to achieve via social media employment is to improve customer relationship.
To my gunuine surprise almost 23% believed the advantages of social networking participation are unclear and 42% felt that the costs outweigh the benefits.