Last week the Altimeter Group and Wetpaint released a study that analyzed the 100 most valuable brands (according to BusinessWeek/Interbrand) and how they engage across 11 different online social-media venues. The result of the study was published as  "engagement database" that critiqued the brands on not only their breadth of engagement across these channels, but also their depth, such as whether they reply to comments made on blog posts. Each brand was given a numerical score. The top 10 ENGAGEMENTdb brands with their scores are:

1. Starbucks (127)
2. Dell (123)
3. eBay (115)
4. Google (105)
5. Microsoft (103)
6. Thomson Reuters (101)
7. Nike (100)
8. Amazon (88)
9. SAP (86)
10. Tie - Yahoo!/Intel (85)

The full report is available at http://bit.ly/KRGNt. Personally, it's questionable to assume that  a company's social engagement can be correlated with its financial performance.   But, in Steve Rubel's words "good use of social media could be seen as a proxy for an innovative culture, eagerness to engage with consumers and take risks, a net positive for any business." Much more interesting then this is however to take a look at what the social media strategy of those brands have in common: All top brands weren't afraid of innovation, did so early, often (also after set-backs) and incrementally:

• Starbucks and Dell were early to leverage their fans for corporate crowd-sourcing.
• With Nikeplus.com, Nike was early in the game to use an innovative technology in order to connect its worldwide fan base in early 2006.
• Quite a few of the top 10 brands embraced Twitter early and in innovative ways. Amazon started offering deals on Twitter back in 2007 and EBay started to live-tweet earnings in 2008.
• Microsoft encouraged their employees to blog as early as in the late 1990. Yahoo and Google started and actively promoted their corporate and product blogs in 2004
• Other top brands were building out communities to connect customers and employees early on. Microsoft, for example, launched its inventive Channel 9 platform for developers back in 2004

Alexis Ohanian, founder of Reddit, gives a great 3-minute rundown on the power of social media. Check it out at TED here.

...you get the Most Innovative Celebrities in Digital Media, or, the Econoclast10.

According to a new Nielsen Online report (and reported here by Wired), Twitter users have shot up 343% since September 2007 - making it the fastest growing social network in the United States. In growth rates, behind Twitter came Tagged.com and Ning. While Facebook has experienced a 116% growth since last year, MySpace still rules with themost members (59.4 million in September, compared to 39 million for Facebook), despite it's measly 1% jump from last year. See more on the Nielson Online report here.

Yesterday, Twitter launched a redesigned homepage, which shows a shift in focus towards search (rather than specific users, as the old homepage highlighted). It seems that this new homepage could be a recognition, on Twitter’s part, of how users have shaped the microblogging platform - it’s now the place where you can find up-to-the-minute information on what’s happening NOW (rather than depending on search engines that are increasingly appearing to post more dated content, dependant on the slower nature of crawling the web and indexing content). Just look at the trends to see what people are talking about right this second (um…M&Ms and William Shatner? Really?). So does this poise Twitter to take on the search behemoths of Google and bing? Only time will tell…

I'll admit it - I'm a complete internet radio junkie. I love it, listen to it constantly, and rely on it to introduce me to new stuff. Up until now, I've been a solid last.fm girl, but I recently stumbled upon blip.fm. Blip is an odd combination of Twitter and internet radio, that allows you to become a "DJ," to "blip" what you're listening to, and to listen to other DJs who have similar tastes to you. I'm still trying to get a feel for how it all works, but it seems pretty great. Check it out here - and add me as a DJ - my DJ name is "isureamheather."

Over the weekend, we were very excited to launch the redesigned website for Swanke Hayden Connell Architects (www.shca.com). We've been working closely with SHCA since January to design and develop an exciting and innovative new website, one which looks sleek and modern while still embracing the firm's long and rich history. We're extremely happy with the results - check it out here!

And now some great eye candy to go along with your daily stalking of Twitter: Visible Tweets. Just check out what it did to the 4C tweets: By the way, are you following the 4C team on Twitter? If not - you should! @4cornersdesign

A wise man once said, "Wherever you go, there you are," and now with Geode, announced today from Mozilla Labs, your web browser will know where you are as well. Geode will be available in the upcoming beta releases of Firefox 3.1, and will allow users to fire up their computers from any location, direct their browser to their favorite review site (like Yelp, Citysearch, etc.), and have customized location-specific information surfaced. But the potential expands beyond just fun - imagine an RSS reader that knows the difference between Home and Work, or a news website that is truly local. Read more at the Mozilla Labs blog.

Need to decompress a bit from sitting and staring at your computer for hours on end? Check out thisissand.com for a fun way to do it - reminiscent of those sand art crafts projects we all did as kids. Pick your colors and just click to create mountains of colored sand. Be careful though, this one is addicting...

Twitter has just passed the One Billion Tweets mark, according to GigaTweet!

This is such a cool project that has the goal of representing all 50 states through photography... the website for The 50 States Project says it best:

The 50 States Project has brought together 50 photographers from across the USA.

Each photographer lives in one of the 50 States and during the year long project each photographer will represent the State where they live. Every two months each photographer will be sent an assignment by e-mail, they then have two months to produce one image in response. The images must represent both their style and the State in which they live.

The first assignment, ("People"), was sent on 2nd January 2009. The second, ("Habitat"), was sent on 1st March 2009. The remaining 4 assignments will be announced on 1st May, 1st July, 1st September and 1st November 2009 respectively.

By the end of the project there will be 300 images which hopefully represent the talent of the photographers involved and have something to say about the USA today. Check out the photos from the first assignment ("People"), here.

Finally, something for us [few] PC users [left] out there to get excited about! The Beta version of Google Chrome has launched today, and it's only available for those of us fortunate enough to be running Vista. My initial test run of it here is looking pretty good so far - I'm loving the visual representation of your most visited websites as the default homepage. Check it out here!

Ok - these photos totally blew my mind when I first saw them. Smashing Magazine has put together a phenomenal gallery of examples of tilt shift photography (a photography technique where real objects look like miniatures). A few of my favorites are below (especially the Grand Central one - my favorite building in NYC!).

Last month a social media analytics provider called Sysomos published a in-depth report on Twitter usage. Here are the 10 conclusions that might help a brand to  better understand the potential uses of Twitter:

• 72.5% of all users joining during the first five months of 2009.
• 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update/day
• 21% of users have never posted a Tweet
• 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people.
• 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity
• New York has the most Twitters users, followed by Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco and Boston; while Detroit was the fast-growing city over the first five months of 2009
• More than 50% of all updates are published using tools, mobile and Web-based, other than Twitter.com. TweetDeck is the most popular non-Twitter.com tool with 19.7% market share.
• There are more women on Twitter (53%) than men (47%)
• Of the people who identify themselves as marketers, 15% follow more than 2,000 people. This compares with 0.29% of overall Twitter users who follow more than 2,000 people.

In honor of its 75th anniversary this year, Esquire magazine will be publishing a cover incorporating flashing text designed by MA-based company E Ink (whose technology is also applied in Amazon.com's reading device, Kindle). The text, which reads "the 21st Century Begins Now," will lose juice and stop blinking after 90 days.

“I hope it will be in the Smithsonian,” said David Granger, Esquire’s editor in chief,..."The possibilities of print have just begun. In two years, I hope this looks like cellphones did in 1982, or car phones.”

Read more about it in the New York Times here.

A friend just turned me on to this delightfully simple work log, ididwork.com. The name pretty much says it all; log the work that you did, tag it if you like, and ididwork.com will create charts mapping your work, email your logs to your manager (if desired), and schedule work reviews. This is a handy little tool for jobs where you have to log hours on certain projects, or you may be working on site and have to report in your work to your manager. Just a great example on how simplicity wins over and a site without too many bells and whistles can be most useful.