The Steve Rubel Stream

First, some 66% of online Americans use social networking sites today, up from just 20% in 2007. This has been covered a lot before. However, what's notable is that it's an increasingly additive activity - 43% visit multiple times each day.

Second, social networking is largely synonymous with Facebook. This doesn't bode well for others that are positioning themselves as a social network since it could confuse consumers. (Since it does not require mutual friending, Twitter to me really isn't a social network but a continuous public communications channel.)

Third, social networking is largely viewed as a way to connect with friends, not co-workers or business partners. This may show that people are splitting up their personal/professional networks. This was something LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and I recently discussed and it flies in the face of edge cases like me who have co-mingled the two. (LinkedIn is an Edelman client.)

Last but not least, social networking appears to be more predominant in the western and mountain states, even more than in the east.

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UPDATE: A couple of notes to clarify this post. First, the chart above, which I pulled from compete.com, shows the top sites that Facebook drives traffic to. Also the headline has been updated to reflect that Facebook is driving more traffic to portals than Google. The San Francisco Chronicle story, linked below, notes that Facebook is only starting to encroach on Google for other sites. The trend, however, still holds.

We're at the beginning of a major shift in how we find, consume and interact with information. If the 2000s was the Google decade, then the 2010s will be the Facebook decade. Already, you can see the writing on the wall - pun intended. Case in point: a search for "google decade danny sullivan" pulls up his Facebook note higher than a blog post (an item I wanted to include here for context). But that's nothing. Look at the data.

"The events of the last 18 months have scarred people," Mr. Edelman said. "People have to see messages in different places and from different people. That means experts as well as peers or company employees. It's a more-skeptical time. So if companies are looking at peer-to-peer marketing as another arrow in the quiver, that's good, but they need to understand it's not a single-source solution. It's a piece of the solution."

During a recent meeting with Forbes they shared with me a summary of their recent survey of Chief Marketing Officers (embedded below). There are two notable trends here - which Forbes isn't connecting, but I am.