The Chesterfield Hotel in Mayfair, London is at the top of the table for the17th week running now.

Download this list as a PDF here

(List is correct as of 27^th July 2010)

The data in this list differs slightly to that of our Facebook list and is ranked according to the hotel’s influence on the twitter verse.

We’ve used twitter.grader.com to rank each hotel on twitter. This clever little app considers many different factors including number of followers, number of followings and number of posts (among many others). This creates a score, enabling each twitter account to be ranked out of all the accounts that have been graded in the twitter network.

It basically gives you an idea of the impact each tweet has.

The grade is out of 100 and represents the percentage of accounts that have less of an impact than yours. For example, a TwitterGrade of 95 means tweets from your account have more of an impact than tweets from 95% of all other graded accounts on twitter. Pretty impressive hey?!

As with all our lists, we’ve done our best to recognise every contender for the list but a few are bound to have slipped through the net. If you think your hotel should be included on the list, please let us know by commenting below, remembering to include your “@” twitter account name.

The list is open to all hotels in the UK.

The Travelodge Ireland in Nationwide is at the top of the table for the third week in a row- Well done!

Download the list as a PDF here

(List is correct as of 30th July 2010)

The data in this list differs slightly to that of our Facebook list and is ranked according to the hotel’s influence on the twitter verse.

We’ve used twitter.grader.com to rank each hotel on twitter. This clever little app considers many different factors including number of followers, number of followings and number of posts (among many others). This creates a score, enabling each twitter account to be ranked out of all the accounts that have been graded in the twitter network.

It basically gives you an idea of the impact each tweet has.

The grade is out of 100 and represents the percentage of accounts that have less of an impact than yours. For example, a Twitter Grade of 95 means tweets from your account has more of an impact than tweets from 95% of all other graded accounts on twitter. Pretty impressive hey?!

As with our Facebook list, we’ve done our best to recognise every contender for the list but a few are bound to have slipped through the net. If you think your hotel should be included on the list, please let us know by commenting below, remembering to include your “@” twitter account name.

The list is open to all hotels in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Be sure to check back each week to see if your hotel has made the list.

In response, the social media community has fought back by saying that these tools actually help them get things done faster, or bring other value to the business. But there have been few substantive conversations about precisely how social media might help you get things done.

Beyond Millennials, the “new workforce” is being defined by a work style that blurs personal and professional time. That development has spawned professionals that craftily use social media to get things done. Yes, the initial draw was networking, but as those relationships become more essential to your professional responsibilities, social media becomes an area where you can get a lot of work done too.

The trick is to realize that it’s not about the tool itself, but your ability to step back and analyze the tool’s real value in helping you accomplish tasks. If you’re not evaluating the way that you’re using social media to get things done, then you’re probably becoming increasingly inefficient because of it.

Without further ado, here are a few areas where social media can make you a productivity rock star, if you use it well.

Scalable Networking

Ten years ago, “networking” was done in restaurants, bars, on the phone and at conferences. Today the majority of networking occurs online, in tweets, e-mails, LinkedIn invites, and more. To put it bluntly, the difference between networking in 1995 and networking today, is about two hours less face time.

For instance, you can initiate a relationship with a mere tweet on Twitter or a comment on a blog post that shares an opinion or compliments someone. The tweet or comment only takes a matter of seconds, and you’re off and running with the start of a new relationship. The other party will remember you, and is beginning to value your opinions.

There is a lot of time saved when networking is done online, and the process scales rapidly with today’s tools. You can meet hundreds and thousands of people online, forge relationships in a matter of minutes, and maintain them long-term with much less effort.

Actionable Information is More Valuable

Information overload isn’t a new problem, and some folks would argue that Twitter and other tools have only made information overload more of a problem. But the truth is that if you carefully use tools like Twitter, Yahoo Pipes, RSS readers, Google Alerts and bookmarking to discover content that’s pertinent to your job, you can become extraordinarily efficient in finding, consuming and cataloging an enormous amount of information in a very short period of time. The key to staying productive is to distinguish your personal time spent with social media from your professional use of it.

Think about financial advisers reviewing stock information, market trends and news on important companies. Imagine their advantage if they were to systematize their information discovery through social media and better leverage communities like StockTwits. They would find content that is recommended by trusted friends and professionals in real-time, rather than relying solely on proprietary finance software and what surfaces on Google

And it’s not just about finding the information; it’s about finding actionable information. Google alone doesn’t always reveal actionable information — only relevant links. But real people participating in social media surface incredible amounts of actionable information, with limited barriers to acting upon it quickly.

The recent phantom crash on Wall Street was initiated by a series of minor errors in a matter of seconds. Trades were happening in milliseconds, but news coverage scrambled to catch up to what was going on. Imagine if your adviser was tapped into real-time feeds to stay ahead of the game.

The application of this concept is obvious for any employee in the services world. Knowledge is everything, and social media used properly, is a tool to find, consume and act upon the most relevant, reliable information on the web in real-time.

Social Data Means Collaborative Freedom

One of the challenging things about collaboration is that while in theory it’s a huge productivity booster, it’s equally as likely to be a productivity killer when abused. Collaboration is also closely associated to the tools and applications built to support it. So if you’re collaborating with a group, and some people don’t like or simply can’t get the hang of a tool, then it’s a huge problem.

That being said, the beauty of modern social media and embedded social functionality in applications is that they are built for easy data portability — the message doesn’t always have to be tied to the medium. Twitter and Facebook feeds can be dumped into an entirely different application that’s more suited for your personal taste and work flow.

Twitter and Yammer clients might be the very best example of this. Anyone can use the service without having to live with an application that doesn’t suit their tastes and needs. In another sense, FriendFeed was quite successful at tying together almost infinite services and displaying them in one easy to use location.

In a world where collaboration is most often supported by some type of software, social media can provide the functionality to make sure that everyone can be productive while using the tool that works best for them.

Get the rest of the story from Mashable.Com

In your search for the right tool(s), you should be looking to both monitor and measure your brand on social media. The two terms are used somewhat interchangeably, and although there is some overlap and similarity in business goals, monitoring and measurement are distinct processes. Let’s take a look at each one in a bit more detail.

Social Media Monitoring

Monitoring (or perhaps the more evocative definition is “listening”) is the process of continuous and immediate discovery of conversations with the purpose of learning, engaging, helping and collaborating. You can do this with anyone, whether it’s your customers, prospects, industry thought leaders, former customers, partners or others. There are also different cues to listen for and different ways to engage. Typically, monitoring has a stronger real-time implication than measurement, as one of the purposes is to track keywords as they appear, with the goal of quick reaction.

How it works: Typically, monitoring is performed on a keywords basis. Relevant keywords include your brand name, product name, etc. Based on your keywords, your monitoring system of choice goes out to the social networks you specify, grabs the relevant articles and messages, and hopefully arranges them for easier digestion and action.

Why it’s important: My favorite analogy for social media is that it’s like the “largest cocktail party in the world.” It’s a room filled with people driven by one desire to communicate, share, digest and relate, while carrying on many independent conversations. Some of these conversations can be about you, your competitors or your industry. Some of these conversations could be people looking for a product like yours. They will talk about all these topics regardless of whether you are listening or not. However, you wouldn’t know any of this if you weren’t listening.

Read More of the story at Mashable.Com

On July 22nd 2010, Facebook officially announced that it had surpassed 500 million users around the world. This significant achievement represents a significant milestone for Zuckerberg and Co. as well as for social networking and more importantly for global societies overall.

To celebrate this achievement, Facebook released Facebook Stories, a new service to spotlight user stories from around the world and the impact Facebook has had on their lives.

Facebook Around the World

Facebook is the leading social network in 111 out of 131 countries as recently analyzed by Vincenzo Cosenza.

If Facebook was a country, it would rank third, just behind the People’s Republic of China and India and roughly 190 million ahead of the United States, over 200 million greater than Indonesia, and 300 million greater than Brazil.

If we examine the breakdown of Facebook’s population, we’re presented with an interesting picture of worldwide adoption (source).

Top 15 Countries by Number of Users

1. United States – 125,881,220
2. United Kingdom – 26,543,600
3. Indonesia – 25,912,960
4. Turkey – 22,552,540
5. France – 18,942,220
6. Italy – 16,647,260
7. Canada – 15,497,900
8. Philippines – 15,284,460
9. Mexico – 12,978,440
10. Spain – 10,612,820
11. India – 10,547,240
12. Argentina – 10,452,040
13. Columbia – 10,226,920
14. Germany – 9,948,700
15. Australia – 9,151,280

To offer a bit of balance, at the end of the population list, Anguilla Facebook ambassadors rank at number 187 with 6,420 users.

When we examine worldwide Facebook activity however, we’re presented with a different picture. According to O’Reilly Research, Asia and Africa represent high growth regions.O’Reilly also reports the age demographics of users in each country. The share of users age 18-25 is higher outside the U.S., but notice the representation of users 35 and older.

The Human Network

Facebook’s mission is to help make the world more open and connected and indeed it is changing how people interact online. The “Facebook” stories shared through this new service highlight very human ways that social networking is changing people’s lives and I believe that is the bigger story here. Over time, I have borrowed Cisco’s tagline, “The Human Network” to demonstrate how digital social networks were contributing to a new era of society that transcends online and offline relationships and how we foster and interact with each.

The discussion as to whether or not Facebook is the largest social network in the world is no longer relevant. Facebook, along with other prominent and emerging networks such as Twitter, Foursquare, and hundreds of other networks, has forever changed the way individuals connect and share with one another, adapting cultures and customs, dissolving borders, and uniting disparate cultures. The world is indeed becoming a much smaller place.

Get the rest of the story from Brain Solis.Com

Well done to The Landmark Hotel, Killyhelvin Hotel and O’Callaghan Hotels who are all new to the table this week, Congratulations!

For the 21^st week in a row the Fitzwilton Hotel, Waterford remains unbeaten at number 1 on the list.

Download the list as a PDF here

(List correct as of 26^th July 2010)

The list is by no means final so if you feel we’ve missed you out, please let us know by commenting below and your hotel/group could appear on next weeks list.

The list is based on the number of fans the Facebook page has and is open to all hotels in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

This list only considers Facebook Pages as opposed to groups and personal profiles.

A Page or a Group, which is better? Well the answer to that depends on you and what works for your business.

Facebook Groups:

1. Set up for more personal interaction, they are highly active and require constant engagement.
2. Connected to the profile of the people who administer them.
3. When you post something as a group administrator, it appears to be coming from you and is attached to your personal profile.
4. Groups are great for organizing on a personal level and for smaller scale interaction around a cause.
5. If the group is under 5,000 members, group admins can send messages to the group members that will appear in their inboxes.
6. Permissions settings make it possible for group admins to restrict access to a group, so that new members have to be approved.
7. Groups can’t host applications.
8. You can advertise your group.

Facebook Pages:

1. Access to a Page, however, can only be restricted by certain ages and locations.
2. Page admins can send updates to fans through the Page, and these updates will appear in the “Updates” section of fans’ inboxes.
3. There is no limit on how many fans you may send an update to, or how many total fans a Page can have.
4. Pages can host applications, so a Page can essentially be more personalized and show more content.
5. Pages can benefit from social ads that publicize the fan connection between a Page and a specific user.
6. Pages are better for brands, businesses, bands, movies, or celebrities who want to interact with their fans or customers without having them connected to a personal account, and have a need to exceed Facebook’s 5,000 friend cap.

Neither Groups nor Pages have great moderation features. If someone posts spam on your Group or your Page, you have to remove it manually, and you can also remove specific members.

So it’s up to you who best suits your business right now and going forward.

Be sure to check back every Monday to see if your hotel has made the list!

1. Al Pacino’s Face Was on the Original Facebook Homepage

Prior to a major homepage redesign back in 2007, Facebook’s front page used to feature a man’s face partly obscured behind a cloud of binary code

Dubbed the “Facebook guy,” it was not known who the mystery man was — until recently. David Kirkpatrick has revealed in his book The Facebook Effect that the image is a manipulated photo of Al Pacino created by a friend and classmate of Mark Zuckerberg.

2. One Early Facebook Function Was a File Sharing Service

You won’t find this in the official Facebook timeline, but one of Facebook’s early add-ons was a peer-to-peer, or more technically friend-to-friend, file sharing service called Wirehog, developed alongside Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg and three others.

It launched in 2004 and is reported to have been planned as an integral FB feature. In 2005 Facebook was actively promoting the service and Zuckerberg told The Harvard Crimson “I think Wirehog will probably spread in the same way that thefacebook did.”

However, likely due to piracy concerns, Wirehog was axed in 2006 before Facebook got really big, although its photo-sharing functionality lives on in spirit.

3. The First “Work Networks” Included Apple and Microsoft

Many of you may know about Facebook’s initial staggered rollout, where they started with Ivy League colleges before encompassing other educational institutions. But do you know who Facebook first went corporate with in terms of official work places?

In May 2006, Apple and Microsoft were among the first, as was Intel, EA and Amazon. Others in the first round also included Accenture, Gap, Intuit, Pepsi, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the non-profit organization Teach for America. It wasn’t until September 2006 that everyone, regardless of school or company affiliation, could join Facebook — and just over a year later the site hit 50 million active users.

4. Facebook’s Hidden Easter Eggs

Facebook is no stranger to Easter eggs. Early on, mysterious movie-related references (apparently Zuckerberg is a big film buff) could be found littering the site.

The references could be found in the footer of the old “Friends Page” in 2007, and one of the first was a quail-themed quote from the film The Wedding Crashers. Later dubbed “quails,” other quotes with the avian theme continued to appear in the footer text, including “Only the craftiest of quails survive hunting season,” and “What doesn’t kill a quail only makes it stronger.”

In addition, Facebook once boasted a Konami Code (you know — up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, enter) that changed the background of the site to display colorful circles and light flares.

Finally, there’s the “Chris Putnam,” a Facebook Chat Easter egg that still works today. To test it out, when in chat type in :putnam: and hit enter — ta da!

5. The Meaning of the Term Poke Has Never Been Defined

While Facebook explains how “poking” works on its help center, there’s no explanation to be found for the origin of the phrase. The most common definition is a friendly “nudge,” but the more flirtatious connotations cannot be ignored.

David Kirkpatrick reveals in The Facebook Effect that Zuckerberg once responded to a question about what a poke meant on the social networking site with: “We thought it would be fun to make a feature that has no specific purpose… So mess around with it, because you’re not getting an explanation from us.”

The Travelodge Ireland in Nationwide is at the top of the table for the second week in a row- Well done!

Download the list as a PDF here

(List is correct as of 23rd July 2010)

The data in this list differs slightly to that of our Facebook list and is ranked according to the hotel’s influence on the twitter verse.

We’ve used twitter.grader.com to rank each hotel on twitter. This clever little app considers many different factors including number of followers, number of followings and number of posts (among many others). This creates a score, enabling each twitter account to be ranked out of all the accounts that have been graded in the twitter network.

It basically gives you an idea of the impact each tweet has.

The grade is out of 100 and represents the percentage of accounts that have less of an impact than yours. For example, a Twitter Grade of 95 means tweets from your account has more of an impact than tweets from 95% of all other graded accounts on twitter. Pretty impressive hey?!

As with our Facebook list, we’ve done our best to recognise every contender for the list but a few are bound to have slipped through the net. If you think your hotel should be included on the list, please let us know by commenting below, remembering to include your “@” twitter account name.

The list is open to all hotels in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Be sure to check back each week to see if your hotel has made the list.

Fast forward to today and the sites we use and the way we use them have shifted dramatically. Facebook is closing in on Google as the Web’s most trafficked site. There are hundreds of thousands of mobile applications that users access across a variety of smartphones, and social media is increasingly being consumed and produced on the go. And “Like” buttons have become the new form of social currency for publishers around the world.

How did we get to this point? Here’s a quick look back at the last five years in social media.

The News Feed Brings It All Together:

In late 2006, Facebook introduced the news feed – a controversial concept at the time (incidentally, there are many parallels between it and Facebook’s most recent privacy issues) that has since become perhaps the most important and oft-imitated feature in social networking.

It’s hard to remember life before the news feed, but it consisted mostly of visiting your friend’s profiles, making wall comments and perhaps maintaining a photo gallery. For Facebook, this innovation (and a lack of innovation by then leading social network MySpace is the one that established the service’s utility and has been at the heart of its expansion since — showing you at a glance what your friends are up to on Facebook and around the Web.

Nowadays, whether it’s Twitter , Foursquare , Flickr or yes, MySpace, the experience very much centers around seeing the most recent updates from your friends, in reverse-chronological order.

Video Emerges as Social Media’s Perfect Compliment:

A few months before the birth of Mashable , YouTube made its debut on the Web in February 2005, making an unprecedented ascent into the mainstream consciousness. By December of that year, it had already become the most popular video site, and by July of 2006, it was serving 100 million video views per day (today, it serves more than 2 billion views daily). Then, in October, Google bought YouTube for a whopping $1.6 billion, just 18 months after the site launched.

At the end of last year, I declared YouTube the top social media innovation of the decade, as it has come to embody so much of what we now know as social media, from highly shareable content to citizen journalism to the ability of anyone with a camera to claim their 15 minutes of fame.

Social Networks Spread Their Wings:

In early 2008, a new battle in the social media space emerged – the battle over portable identity. While OpenID had long promised a single sign-on for third-party websites, Facebook, MySpace and Google () started to realize that your social networking profile had potential to be used as your identity across the Web, while at the same time enabling publishers to make their sites more social.

Facebook Connect emerged, as did Google Friend Connect and MySpaceID. Eventually, as Twitter’s popularity grew, they also got in the game. Today, Facebook Connect – which has evolved into the Facebook Open Graph – is used by hundreds of thousands of websites that can add simple copy and paste code to let their visitors “Like” stuff; “Likes” that are then pushed back into the Facebook News Feed. MySpace and Twitter ultimately hooked up with Google Friend Connect , which is now in use on some 9 million sites.

Read More at Mashable

The Chesterfield Hotel in Mayfair, London is at the top of the table for the16th week running now, well done!

KWest Hotel & Spa are new to the list this week, well done, Keep up the good work!

Dowload This List As PDF Here

(List is correct as of 20^th July 2010)

The data in this list differs slightly to that of our Facebook list and is ranked according to the hotel’s influence on the twitter verse.

We’ve used twitter.grader.com to rank each hotel on twitter. This clever little app considers many different factors including number of followers, number of followings and number of posts (among many others). This creates a score, enabling each twitter account to be ranked out of all the accounts that have been graded in the twitter network.

It basically gives you an idea of the impact each tweet has.

The grade is out of 100 and represents the percentage of accounts that have less of an impact than yours. For example, a TwitterGrade of 95 means tweets from your account have more of an impact than tweets from 95% of all other graded accounts on twitter. Pretty impressive hey?!

As with all our lists, we’ve done our best to recognise every contender for the list but a few are bound to have slipped through the net. If you think your hotel should be included on the list, please let us know by commenting below, remembering to include your “@” twitter account name.

The list is open to all hotels in the UK.

Be sure to check back each week to see if your hotel has made the list.