With the help of Google data, Royal Pingdom have looked at 12 of the top social networks to answer a simple but highly interesting question: where are they the most popular?

The social networks they included in this survey were MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, Friendster, LinkedIn, Orkut, Last.fm, LiveJournal, Xanga, Bebo, Imeem and Twitter.

See the results at http://royal.pingdom.com/?p=336.

The Online Community Research Network initiated an online community compensation study in July this year to get a broad look at online community compensation, factors that effect compensation, and the current environment of the community team and community staff roles.

They received approximately 225 responses. Participants represent a healthy swath of the types of organizations participating in online community building activities, including: large software companies, large community destination sites, niche community sites, platform providers, interactive marketing firms and independent consultants.

Key findings from the report:

• - The majority of the respondents are: Female (55%) vs. Male (45%).
• - The majority (61%) of respondents ranged in age from 31-50 years of age.
• - Most of the respondents have more than 5 years of experience, completed a Bachelors Degree, and work 41-50 hours per week.
• - The average Salary of the respondents was $81k with a median of $72.5k. There were peaks on both the low ($0-$25k) and high ends (more than $150k), and then also at $60-$65k.
• - Women are earning only 91% of what men are earning; women averaged $77k, and the men averaged $85k. The average annual salary for all participants was almost $81k.
• - Most participants are satisfied with their jobs with an average satisfaction score of 4.2 and a median score of 4 (on a scale of 1-5).

The report is available for free to members of the Online Community Research Network or available to purchase for non-members.

Remember Charlie aka Mr Enterprise 2.0? One of the best series of slides to teach the basics of Enterprise 2.0 to newbies.

A few weeks later came Charlotte, Ms Web 2.0 and one of Charlie’s friends. Followed by Dave, the Facebook fanboy and startup mentor.

The latest one I discovered is Jessica aka Dr Enterprise 2.0. Wow, I didn’t even know one could be “Dr Enterprise 2.0″. Basically, it’s a Charlie-like set of slides on how to use some of the Enterprise 2.0 techniques in the pharmaceutical industry.

Today, business professionals everywhere are meeting online to share ideas, make decisions and generally be more efficient and productive. The savings in both time and money can be astounding, but where should you start?

Bnet proposes a live webcast on August 27 at 5pm GMT on using collaboration technologies to improve business efficiency.

Smart enterprises are deploying blogs and wikis to power the Enterprise front line: Sales. Use cases may involve using Enterprise 2.0 technology to distribute timely market information, maintain a continuous loop of customer feedback, or maintain a wiki to manage selling points, FAQs, and collateral.

The Aberdeen Group is working to build benchmarks for how enterprises are deploying social media in general, and for various use cases like Sales. They just launched a benchmark study called “Sales 2.0: Getting Social About Selling”. Participants to the survey will receive a complimentary copy of the report ($399 value) allowing them to benchmark their sales performance and enterprise-wide use of social media against peers and Best-in-Class companies. The report is expected to be available on October 1st, 2008.

Via Traction Software.

“The most common problem with top-down efforts is that businesses simply roll out the technology and assume everything else will take care of itself. Usually what happens in these cases is an email goes out to workers announcing the new corporate Wiki, traffic to the Wiki spikes in the hours after the email, and then you see an immediate dive off a cliff. The technology might be great, but it isn’t solving a problem by itself.

A corporate Wiki won’t work unless it contains information that helps people, which could be as simple as a list of restaurants near the office. That’s the key to the grass-roots projects - at least the ones that succeed. They become a source of information that people didn’t have or no where to find. And usually it’s the person with the pain that can best imagine the cure.”

Via The Wall Street Journal.