Lee Dodd is running a poll to see which social media sites are used most often (i.e. Digg, Technorati, etc.). I’m really curious to see the outcome – we’ll check back with him in a couple of days to see which tools are most popular with his readers.

This is a particularly important issue for business bloggers because deciding which tagging/sharing sites to include in your “share this post” field can start to seem quite arbitrary, especially in the absence of any really meaningful numbers. There are some interesting WordPress plug-ins that get around this by offering the whole selection, which is helpful. However, I’d really love to see some impartial ongoing stats on which sites actually get the most traffic/use!

Update: Digg won by a landslide, with 78 votes to Stumbleupon’s 11 and del-icio.us’ 10. Personally? I never use Digg, but use del.icio.us all the time. Go figure!

There’s a great project underway south of the border called the Association Community Blogs and Podcasts Wiki:

The goal of this project is to create a master list of associations that are using blogging, podcasting or other social media tools in their work… PLEASE NOTE: These are social media applications sponsored by associations, rather than blogs, podcasts and so forth about associations.

The list includes anything and everything from our own AIMS Canada to the Mississippi Hospital Association and is a great resource for any similar organization looking to research best practices.

If there was any question that 2007 will be the year that social media breaks into mainstream corporate communications, this short piece from Direct Marketing News should put those doubts to rest:

Ogilvy North America, a unit of the Ogilvy Group agency network, is allying with Technorati to provide clients with blogs, video blogs, videos, photos and other online user-generated media.

The agency will use the Technorati Conversational Marketing System to offer tools, strategies and tactics for clients to syndicate content, participate in interactive dialogues and build relationships with online communities key to their brands.

Interesting times, my friends – you can read the complete text of the press release here.

I know that the concept of the Social Media Press Release is a new one – no problem, these things take time. However, does anyone else see the irony in this situation? This morning CNW Group put out a press release for the Canadian New Media Awards and though HTML, though a bloody webpage, it does not have any links and even worse? The one URL that’s listed – the URL for the CNMA website – is wrong (as I discovered when I cut and pasted it into my browser address bar).

I really do not understand why, in this day and age, any wire service or CLIENT would even consider that this would be an acceptable press release format (i.e. completely static). It’s absolutely ridiculous. Maybe they should just go back faxing it to me instead?