"The problem with most analysis on Twitter," says Rohit Bhargava in a post at the Influential Marketing Blog, "is that it is limited by the minimal amount of data that Twitter collects." He found some useful information, however, in a comprehensive eport on Twitter usage recently released by Sysomos. Here are a few of the key takeaways Bhargava cites:

• More than 20% of Twitter accounts are empty placeholders. In other words, a fifth of Twitter's registered users have never posted a single tweet. According to Bhargava, they've likely claimed a username for later use, or signed up and never followed through.
• The magic number for followers is 150. "In a particularly interesting data point from the survey," he says, "Sysomos found that Twitter users tended to 'follow back' all their followers up until about 150 connections. Then the reciprocation rate fell off dramatically."
• A slight 5% of users generate 75% of the activity. "A steep curve of a small minority of actively engaged content creators generating most of the activity on a site is common among social networks," notes Bhargava, "but it is steeper and more pronounced on Twitter."
• Weekly activity peaks on Tuesday. The next most active days are Wednesday and Friday.

The Po!nt: You need data. According to Bhargava, the Sysomos report and others like it can help you and your brand better understand how to make the most of Twitter.

Source: Influential Marketing. Click here for the full post.

"ESPN regards social networks such as message boards, conversation pages and other forms of social networking such as Facebook and Twitter as important new forms of content. As such, we expect to hold all talent who participate in social networking to the same standards we hold for interaction with our audiences across TV, radio and our digital platforms. This applies to all ESPN Talent, anchors, play by play, hosts, analysts, commentators, reporters and writers who participate in any form of personal social networking that contain sports related content.

ESPN Digital Media is currently building and testing modules designed to publish Twitter and Facebook entries simultaneously on ESPN.com, SportsCenter.com, Page 2, ESPN Profile pages and other similar pages across our web site and mobile platforms. The plan is to fully deploy these modules this fall."

The next time ESPN makes a policy change for their employees, they need to be careful with the wording to avoid this type of media coverage.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE: A rumor has begun floating around tonight that ESPN has all but ended employee tweeting - unless it serves ESPN. But, what does this mean exactly? Are ESPN employees suppose to become mindless robots who only talk about ESPN, with no mention of their pesonal lives?

Backfence.com founder and fellow alum Mark Potts launches new service for local sites.  Best of luck, Mark.

Here's more on the story from Business Week: 

Taming the Web for Local Advertisers

GrowthSpur has a strategy to help business connect with fragmented audiences

By Jon Fine for Business Week

When executives talk about media fragmentation, they often mean national media: myriad cable channels splitting off audiences from declining broadcast networks and consumers increasingly drawn to offerings online and on their phones—Facebook, YouTube (GOOG), blah blah blah. But such fragmentation is, if anything, more acute at the local level. The same competitive troubles affect the established TV and radio players, and the city newspaper is likely readying its application for the endangered species list. Or it's already beginning its slow fade: In mid-July, the Ann Arbor News ceased daily publication, though a smaller-staffed Web site and a twice-weekly print product will remain.

If you're an advertiser, this leaves a hole in the market. The newspaper, one crucial way to get a message to lots of consumers, is shrunken or gone. Sure, a zillion local blogs have popped up; some of them have real value. But the thing is, there's a zillion of them, and few have followings of any size, so you have to amalgamate ad buys across 10 or 15 blogs to get anything resembling a decent audience. Buying ads on one neighborhood's best little blog might leave much of a retail outlet's market uncovered. And buying ads on such blogs often means dealing with one- or two-person operations run by people who might be good at making sentences but who know little about business. "They are bloggers, not salespeople. They have other jobs," says Andrea Kerr Redniss, senior vice-president at media-buying agency Optimedia. "Wrangling those people together is horrendous."

All of which helps explain why so much advertising remains concentrated in traditional outlets and why so few, if any, independent local online ventures end up knee-deep in ad dollars. Many fail. Mark Potts, who knows from unsuccessful local online ventures—his Backfence.com, a network of community news sites, went under in 2007—is trying to erect a superstructure that will help advertisers and content sites alike make sense of the new landscape. His new company, GrowthSpur, will drape an ad network around the chaosphere of local online markets. Its networks will allow advertisers, local or national, to buy ads from sales reps across a wide array of sites, choosing among them (yes to the local parenting blog, no to the local beer-geek site) to assemble ad buys in a new and more painless fashion. For an undisclosed cut of ad revenues, GrowthSpur will string a bunch of sites into a network and automate the buying and selling of ads across said network. It will also teach inexperienced bloggers the finer points of selling ads.

Read more in Business Week

The conventional wisdom is that alternative weeklies have their best days behind them.  But that’s clearly not the position of Village Voice Media, which owns 15 titles reaching about ¼ of the 7.6 million alt weekly readers in the U.S.

President and COO Scott Tobias notes that VVM has aggressively moved online in the last 2.5 years. Online currently represents 20 percent of the company’s revenue. Title revenue is complemented by revenue from national features (BackPage.com, which is claimed as the largest classifieds site after Craig’s List; and Likeme, a ratings and review site) and networks (Voice Local Network and Ruxton Media Network, the latter of which will soon be rebranded ).

At the local level, the company’s especially zeroed in on breaking out VVM’s vertical strengths, particularly in restaurants, music, arts and calendars. “We are the number one in music page views in all of our markets,” says Tobias. “We’re number 1 or 2 in food.”

Unlike daily newspapers, “we do just a few things and we do them very well,” he says. Everything is tailored around the core 18-34 year old demographic. Tobias adds that vertical strengths should pick up as new widgets are applied that direct traffic directly to the individual verticals.