Neil Patel – fellow Elite Retreat speaker – was profiled with about 15 other social media “Wizards of Buzz” in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (WSJ). Neil is an active blogger at Pronet Advertising and is CTO of ACS.

The WSJ provides a summary of each of the leading social media websites, including, Digg.com, Reddit.com (recently purchased by Condé Nast), Del.icio.us (bought by Yahoo), Newsvine.com, StumbleUpon.com, and Netscape. In general, if you’re not familiar at all with social media the WSJ is a decent read (see below for a summary of each of the main websites); however, the article doesn’t go into any great detail about how the websites work.

Neil Patel’s “star” has really been building over the last 6-months or so. I originally met Neil and his team in San Jose, CA in August 2006 at Search-Engine Strategies (Bodog party) – at the time I never heard of Neil or his company. However, since that conference I’ve watched more and more industry insiders and blog readers become very impressed with Neil’s expertise in the social media space. Also – I’ve personally had the opportunity to get to know Neil and learn more about his social media / buzz marketing skills – he is definitely a powerhouse and a leading expert at what he does.

From the WSJ – here is a summary of each of the main social media websites:

Digg: One of the largest social-media sites in terms of submissions, San Francisco-based Digg.com launched in late 2004 and now has about 900,000 registered users and 20 million visitors monthly, the site says. Digg’s content leans heavily on technology and science, but to help broaden its appeal, the site recently added new sections for entertainment and podcasts.

Reddit: Reddit works similarly to Digg, with people submitting stories and the wider community voting on them. The submitter receives one “karma” point for each positive vote and loses one for each negative vote. Condé Nast’s Wired Digital acquired the Cambridge, Mass., company in October.

StumbleUpon: Unlike most other social-media sites, StumbleUpon requires users to download a toolbar onto their Web browsers. Click the “Thumbs Up” or “Thumbs Down” buttons when you visit a site you like or don’t like and it will automatically post it to your page on StumbleUpon.com. You can also click “Stumble” on the toolbar and be redirected to a site another user has voted on that matches your interests.

Del.icio.us: Del.icio.us is essentially a database of users’ bookmarked sites. The more other users bookmark a site, the more popular it becomes, and the more likely it is to land on the “hotlist” page. Started in 2003, Del.icio.us was acquired by Yahoo in 2005.

Newsvine: Seattle-based Newsvine launched last March with a focus on what has become known as “citizen journalism,” amateurs reporting on the news. Users post links they think are interesting, and also post their own articles and opinion pieces, on which others in the community can then submit comments.

Netscape: One of the first major Web browsers, Netscape relaunched last June as a social news site similar to Digg. A unit of AOL, it caused a stir last year when it began wooing top users from other social-media sites and paid these “navigators” $1,000 a month to submit links.

For more about the WSJ article go HERE or simply read the article HERE.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 11th, 2007 at 11:54 am and is filed under Uncategorized, search-engine marketing, social media optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.