LinkedIn Corp. closed its first day of public trading on May 19 at $94.25 per share, tallying a net worth of nearly $9 billion.

This development triggered optimism for other social media companies anticipating Initial Public Offerings (IPOs), including Facebook — with a projected $100 billion valuation, according to CNBC — and eventually Twitter. Regional deal-of-the-day site Groupon filed with the SEC for what could lead to an IPO valued at $20 billion.

These activities, however, are also drawing skepticism for similarities to the Internet boom and bust of 1995-2000, when tech companies launched pricey IPOs on lofty visions and little, if any, profits.

IPOs and acquisitions represent the next era of social media awareness. Communicators should welcome this new boost in enthusiasm. We’ve implemented the tools for years — and while concern over another tech bubble is a drama all its own, there are also positives for PR practitioners to leverage during investment and consolidation activities.

Consider the following:

Big-ticket IPOs and acquisitions validate digital communication strategies. If your organization is engaged in networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as a way to connect with audiences and develop customers, then you can tout these activities as signals of strong demand and longevity for social media tools. This is a good time to justify the use of your chosen platforms with internal stakeholders and propose additional investments within your organizations.

Likewise, if leadership is still skeptical of social media, then you can now speak in terms executives appreciate: IPO and acquisition activity is proof that social technologies should be taken seriously.

Publicly traded and acquired social channels have more funding and more stakeholders. LinkedIn now has additional cash to further develop functionality. Imagine what is possible for cash-infused companies and the increased frequency at which they can introduce new features.

As social sites go public or companies acquire them (such as Microsoft buying Skype for $8.5 billion in May), currently free features may become subscription-based as companies look for return on their investments by monetizing some services. Such changes could alter or limit the composition of certain digital communications campaigns.

Mainstay social channels are building on their ideal-use cases. As technology markets mature and consolidate, remaining players position themselves based on core competencies. Brands and the communicators supporting them can better prioritize which tools to use and how much effort they should place on each. Twitter, for example, is impressive at 75 million users, though it’s dwarfed by Facebook’s 600 million users. Twitter is ideal for peer discussions, generating buzz and business-to-business or nonprofit campaigns. And Facebook is better positioned to create communities that consistently influence sales.

Recent behavior demonstrates that each platform is building on these roles. Twitter acquired TweetDeck for $40 million to help users manage high volumes of real-time conversations, while Facebook has introduced services that could supplant competing standalone tools: Facebook Places (location-based sharing; foursquare), Facebook Deals(opt-in sales deals; Groupon) and Facebook Email accounts (Gmail, Yahoo! Mail etc).

PR professionals can follow suit. It’s a great time to use this latest technology buzz as a catalyst to reinvest in and advance your digital communications programs. Even Wall Street says so.

This post also appears as the “Digital Dialogue” column in the July issue of PR Tactics, published by the Public Relations Society of America.

There’s a lot of valuable data for corporate communicators to consider in the 2009 State of the News Media Report on American Journalism published by PEW Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. The report quantifies and analyzes America’s print, television, audio, and online news consumption. Special sections this year analyze election coverage, citizen-based media, and “new ventures.” (Arizonans, note that Arizonaguardian.com is featured in the new ventures section. )

Some points of interest, among many offered in the report include:

• PEW’s survey of Online News Association members indicates that 54% of members surveyed believe journalism is headed in the wrong direction, with only 39% very confident and 43% somewhat confident that a profitable online business model can be identified.
• The number of people either relying on the Web for news or considering it as a major source for news – as one might expect – increased over the past year. This, coupled with the recession, has further diminished already fading ad revenues based on legacy business models.
• The ubiquitous Web vision is playing out. Mainstream onlines have enhanced their content, and more subject-specific news sites have emerged to make online news even more appealing to the masses. (See PEW’s “New Ventures” section for subject-specific examples.)
• With a nod to digital evolution, the Radio section of the report is now referred to as “Audio,” and goes on to call Audio’s future one of “intriguing fragmentation.”
• Micro-blogs, namely Twitter, get special focus within the Online section of the report, with the November 2008 Mumbai hotel raids cited as an example of Twitter’s immediacy and ability to break and share news. 

It’s citizen journalism – via micro-blogs, blogs, and otherwise – that I currently find most fascinating. Citizen journalism is forcing redefinition and/or tightened focus of roles within professional communications. Anyone who is willing can now have a voice via the Web, so professionals need to more clearly add value to the communications process while also harnessing the best of what audience-generated content has to offer.

Some mediums are ignoring or sidestepping this, while others choose to embrace and leverage it. CNN’s iReport is a nice example of the latter. I like that iReport delineates between which audience-generated stories are used by CNN entities, which you’ll find here, and which are not. iReport also encourages reporting aptitude by offering story, photo, video and audio tips to users. Of course there are integrated Facebook and Twitter feeds, and also a weekly news program on CNN highlighting the most interesting iReports.

CNN’s approach is a subtle way of formalizing and activating what is otherwise informal word-of-mouth and community discussion; citizen journalists generally cite just one or no sources, per PEW’s data. And I’m not saying blogs, online communities, an individual’s Tweets, or geographic iReports are less valuable than mainstream news. They’re increasingly what makes the world of information turn ’round, so helping these individual news accounts find their proper fit aids everyone and expands the variety of our knowledgebase.

What’s your opinion of online news growth in relation to the ‘accelerated reduction’ of print publications? Has citizen journalism piqued your interest in Web news, or soured it? Any examples you can share?

What a year of numbers for social media and the Web. Take Twitter for example. Approximately 70% of its nearly five million users registered for the service in 2008 according to HubSpot’s Q4 2008 State of the Twittersphere report. This is but one of many quantitative gems that cap an impressive year of social media growth. The following stats represent a slice of the past year’s activity that I found most impressive.

Google Search - As if there were any doubt, Google continued to hold the top search engine spot with 63.5% of traffic. More impressive to me – although also expected at some point – was Google’s YouTube individually surpassing Yahoo and Microsoft according to the comScore Expanded Search Query Report as referenced on ZDNet’s Between The Lines blog (also thanks to Brent Leary for Tweeting it.)

Google Chrome - Another boon for Google was its Chrome Web browser tallying 10 million users just 100 days after its release. Google also lifted the Beta tag from Chrome, noting that its “goals for stability and performance have been met.” This was a significant move considering many Google apps its senior are still labeled Beta, and an aggressive move in browser/search war terms versus Microsoft and others too.

Facebook - With a 140 million active users and 600 thousand joining daily (according to Inside Facebook and as reported by ReadWriteWeb), Facebook is the juggernaut of social media and online communities. And while Twitter posted impressive numbers of its own this year, ReadWriteWeb calculated that if Facebook were to hold steady at 140 million users while Twitter’s current growth continued, it would take Twitter 36 years to catch up. Two popular and powerful tools, yet a world of difference between them at least as far as uptake is concerned.

Blogosphere - In September Technorati released its annual State of the Blogosphere report. I blogged a bit on it referencing the Universal McCann data that measured 184 million people worldwide having blogs, and 346 million reading them – a ton of content generation for sure. I also found the report’s Day Five data (Brands Enter The Blogosphere) about blogger participation in Web 2.0 activities interesting. The fact that bloggers use other online tools isn’t at all surprising, yet their percentage of activity for things like commenting on other blogs (84%), watching online videos (68%), sharing photos (48%) and using Twitter (41%) confirm that integrated communications are prevalent and expanding. The connected world is now, and its proving out and documenting itself daily.

There’s much more I’m sure. These are just a few social media and Web tools that proved why they’re elite this past year. Lots of social media predictions for 2009 are popping up too. I’ll leave you to surf those out, and will continue my observations of and additions to “the conversation” in the New Year.