The latest stats from StatCounter show that StumbleUpon's recent jump to the top spot for referring social media traffic in the US was not a blip.

I've been studying the web presence of Fortune 500 and INC 500 companies over the past few weeks and it is very encouraging to see a correlation between those at the top of the lists and adoption of social media. During this same time I've seen several blog posts and articles suggesting that websites are a thing of the past and that Facebook and Twitter will dominate business communication online. There is some truth to that, but it is not the whole picture.

There was a full house at the The Kenneth Owler-Smith Symposium at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at USC last night. Steve Rubel of Edelman spoke about how PR and journalism are changing and the need for companies and organizations to expand their view of media and media relations.

EyeforTravel published their 2011 Trends and their number one pick is the increasing need to integrate social content and activity on your corporate website. As budget freezes start to thaw, its time for them )companies( to consider how to integrate social media functionality, for example, incorporating the power of Facebook comment boxes on site to provide a feedback loop for consumers onto their main site.

Listening is not hard these days. There are now over 200 tools that can help you gather the conversations. The next step is not so simple. Finding the right content and figuring out exactly what the people talking about you need and want is critical to PR success today. Content analysis is a traditional PR skill, but data mining is not. Building social graphs has not been part of our PR practice. I dont know about you, but I have not studied math since high school.