ComScore recently did a research, which found that among 40 individual countries reported by comScore, Russia has the world’s most engaged social networking audience, with the average online Russian spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per month.

Brazil ranked close behind Russia at 6.3 hours, followed by Canada (5.6 hours), Puerto Rico (5.3 hours) and Spain (5.3 hours). The US ranked at #9  in terms of social network engagement, with an average of 4.2 average hours and 477 pages consumed per visitor.

I was surprised at once, because I thought that the Asian countries will definitely top the ranking. But neither China, Korea, or Japan is even showing up in this top-20 list. So I looked closely and found out that this data/research doesn’t include the internet Cafe or mobile web browsing…

This is really a good example of showing how mis-leading a social networking research could be. In my opinion, this research totaly ingored the big social networking factor - how it’s being social networked. In other words, in what way people are socializing. Without Internet Cafe data, China of course will not show up; without mobile web browsing, Japan, Korea, South Africa or China will probably not show up. Because that’s how people in those countries socialize. If you cut their main social networking platform, there is no way to understand how they are engaged.

Here is the list of the top 20 countries from ComScore research:

Tags: Australia, Canada, china, ComScore, mobile, Puerto Rico, Russia, Social network service, social networking, Spain

LinkedIn is really doing interesting things based on their existing platform and the database they have. They just launched a new feature “Companies” in Beta this week.

I was shocked when I took a look at what they have under each company’s profile. Some features are the result of partnering with BusinessWeek. Overall, each company has one branding page within LinkedIn, not built by the company itself, but by its employees data (no matter if/how the company wants to build this brand page)…Hoho, this is getting really interesting

Some data/features related to individual users:

1. there is a company introduction section, pulling in BusinessWeek’s existing company profiling data. No big deal.
2. you can see other employees’ names within your current company and “Popular Profiles”. No big deal either.
3. what’s interesting is you can see “New Hires” & “Recent Promotions & Changes”. What? Yeah, I can’t believe this! What a bold and smart idea of user generated content!
4. “Open Jobs” is a good information source for job applicants who are interested in one particular company. No one needs to go to other job sites any more.

Some data/features related to companies:

1. what’s the most interesting one is “Career Path” - Before & After! That’s really a smart way of pulling out & analyzing job profile data! It’s definitely helpful to see the trend for each company on this.
2. “Employee are most connected to” is another interesting one.
3. “company locations” section is another way of letting the employees tell you how the jobs are distributed.
4. Some other data includes “common jobs, top schools” and “median age”, “Male x%” & “Female x%”.

This is definitely another example of showing how powerful user generated content is. Employees define what the company is! I think soon they might have salary info too, like Glassdoor.com (one company rating & review sites with salary poll).

Last two things that they are doing in the Beta version of this “Company” feature are:

1. they do allow you to Remove your profile from certain sections, like “New Hires” or “Recent Promotions” (Good for them to have this option!).
2. they proactively ask for feedback if you see anything incorrect in each company profile.

I believe that there are probably a lot more interesting things to play with LinkedIn database, and other social networking sites too! Data is the biggest asset. Good job, LinkedIn.

Tags: data, linkedin, social network, social networking