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These days, the words "social media campaign" are on the lips of everyone around, from media professionals to small business owners to college students in coffee shops. While the idea of a social media campaign is becoming widespread, the tools to manage one are often left for the former, while the latter look in awe at the price.

ViralHeat, a social media analytics firm, hopes to fill the space left empty by other, far more expensive services.

After news about the landing of US Airways 1549 in the Hudson first broke on Twitter in January 2009, the microblogging service quickly captured the imagination of a new group of potential users. Throughout the first months of 2009, Twitter grew at a rapid pace, peaking at a growth rate of 13% in March 2009.

Now, however, according to the latest data from HubSpot, Twitter's growth is slowing dramatically. In October 2009, Twitter's growth rate had fallen to 3.5%. On a positive note, though, the average active user on Twitter today is more engaged than six months ago.

Smartphone users are becoming increasingly comfortable with using their phones to shop online. According to new data from Compete, about 37% of smartphone users have purchased something with their handset in the last six months. Among the most popular items that these users bought were music, books, DVDs, video games and movie tickets. At the same time, though, Compete also found that smartphone users are very likely to abandon shopping sites that haven't been optimized for mobile usage. Almost 8% of smartphone owners who tried to buy something from their phone were simply unable to do so.

In 2009, the average U.S. Internet user spent 13 hours per week online. This number is down slightly from last year. Thanks to the large interest in the presidential election and the financial crisis, the average Internet user was online for roughly 14 hours per week in 2008. According to a new poll from Harris Interactive, users between the ages of 30 to 39 are the most active Internet users. On average, this group is online for 18 hours per week.

We know that online video continues to grow, but until now we had very little data about how bloggers engage with online video. Thanks to a new report from social media analytics firm Sysomos, we now have very detailed data about the videos being embedded in blogs and which bloggers are using these videos. For this report, Sysomos analyzed over 100 million blog posts and looked at the video-sharing sites being used and compiled a very detailed demographic profile of the bloggers who are embedding videos. Sysomos also released a list of the top 5 most embedded videos of this summer.

According to recent analysis by the Online Publishers Association (OPA), more people than ever are spending their time online visiting content sites which provide news, information, and entertainment. Despite the emergence of social networks, and in particular the rapid growth of Facebook, it's content sites which engage web surfers' attention the most these days - time spent on these sites is up 88% from only five years ago. That's not to say social networking community sites haven't grown too, it's just that their growth hasn't come at the expense of content. Instead, people are using traditional communication sites and services (think webmail, IM, and discussion groups) less and less and choosing to use Facebook and other social networks instead.

Without any fanfare, Google has launched a new resource called "Google Internet Stats" which brings together industry facts and insights from across five different industries. Using a number of third party vendors as sources, the stats tool parses through online data to reveal Twitter-sized snippets and factoids like: "Over 90% of online merchants are planning to add rich media and social networking functions in 2009 -Internet Retailing" or "Runners have collectively logged over 93 million miles on nikeplus.com - BusinessWeek." While the stat center is an excellent new resource, there is one odd thing about it - it's hosted on the google.co.uk domain even though many of the sources used for stats have a global focus.

Yesterday, Nielsen announced that they will make their new "Internet Meter" available by year's end to measure the online television viewing audience. Until now, this ever-increasing demographic has been left out of U.S. television ratings as Nielsen currently focuses only on live and time-shifted (i.e. DVR) TV viewings. Says the company, the Internet Meter software will be deployed by the end of 2009 to their "People Meter" households - the chosen few whose TV-viewing habits function as the representative sample for measuring a show's success. This new addition to the ratings game is bound to have a major impact on TV monetization efforts as both networks and advertisers will see, officially, how many viewers have tuned in to watch this "2nd screen."

Annual changes of note: Facebook #5 with a rocket; Twitter entered Top 50 in June; Demand Media, Answers.com and Break Media sites to watch.

comScore has just released their latest Media Metrix rankings for the Top 50 U.S. Web Properties. If we compare the top 50 to one year ago, we see that the top 4 is still the same: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL. But there's one notable entrant to the top 5: Facebook. Last year the same list by comScore had Facebook ranked number 16. As of July 2009, it is number 5; Facebook's highest ranking yet. What's more, guess who Facebook displaced at number 5? That's right, Fox Interactive, owners of increasingly untrendy MySpace.

The 45 million iPhones and iPod Touches sold over the last two years is having a major impact on the worldwide mobile phone ecosystem. Today, nearly half of smartphone web traffic comes from an Apple device. Although the iPhone is still a popular device in the U.S., the number of international users is now growing at a faster rate than here, at least according to the latest Mobile Metrics Report (PDF) from mobile ad firm AdMob.

Editor's note: we offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write 'Sponsor Posts' and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products. This one is by Hakia, one of the participants in the recent 2009 Semantic Technology Conference.

Participants in the 2009 Semantic Technology Conference walked away considering fundamental questions about what is and isn't semantic technology. The relevance of this post's title will hopefully become clear by the end to those of you mischievous readers who may have stumbled upon it with other ideas. The conference was a great and well-organized affair in San Jose, California. One of the highlights was the Semantic Search Keynote panel, with all of the major players on stage (Ask, Bing, Google, Hakia, TrueKnowledge, and Yahoo!), as seen in the picture below.

According to a new study from Nielsen, Internet users spend more time on social networks and blogs in May 2009 than ever before. The total number of minutes increased 82% year-over-year. Unsurprisingly, Twitter saw the largest gain in total new users among social networks, with a 1,448% increase in visitors from May 2008 to May 2009. Users also started to spend far more time on Twitter in recent months. In May 2008, the average user spent about 6 minutes on Twitter.com, while this number has now grown to more than 17 minutes (Note: as far as we can see these numbers don't seem to take users who use third-party clients into account).

It is important to note, though, that Twitter's growth has slowed down dramatically over the last two months, as both the time per person spent on the site and Twitter's month-over-month growth only increased slightly since April 2009.

Sysomos, a Toronto-based startup, officially launched its two flagship products this morning: MAP (which stands for 'Media Analysis Platform') and Heartbeat. Both products are incredibly powerful (but costly) social media monitoring and analysis tools. In many ways, it is probably best to think of MAP and Heartbeat as companion pieces. Heartbeat basically provides a subset of MAPs features and is somewhat similar to Radian6's social media tools, with a strong focus on making it easy for companies to track social media metrics. MAP, on the other hand, is a far more powerful and flexible analysis tool.

StatPlot is the newest project of sports statistic aggregator StatSheet and you're likely to enjoy it whether you're a sports fan or not. The site makes it easy to assemble attractive, dynamic charts for sports statistics in minutes. Navigate through the long list of options by point and click, autocomplete, cut and paste and you're done. Loads of data is already there and available for your use at no charge.

It's a fun site to use. Basketball, football and NASCAR are supported initially - hopefully baseball and hockey will be next. There's OpenID integration, the image selection is really nice and it's just great. It's still a little rough around the edges but given that the service just launched today - we're impressed. This is the kind of democratized data visualization that any field could benefit from with enough open data and a good user interface.

We already know that the iPhone has quickly become one of the most important mobile platforms, and today, O'Reilly's Ben Lorica took a closer look at the developers behind the most successful applications on the iPhone. Currently, the App Store features about 40,000 different apps, and on average, a typical seller or developer will have about 3.42 apps in the store, though these numbers are somewhat skewed by a few highly prolific developers who publish a lot of apps that are relatively easy to create.

We know that Oprah Winfrey's brought a lot of new users to Twitter in the U.S., but according to Hitwise, the popular microblogging service is currently seeing some of its most impressive growth outside of America. In Australia, where Oprah Winfrey doesn't command the same kind of daytime television audience, Twitter grew over 1,000% since the beginning of 2009, and its annual growth since last April tops 3,200%. In Australia, Twitter is now the 37th most visited web site.

This morning, the Wall Street Journal features an article about professional blogging, a topic that is obviously very close to our hearts here at RWW. Mark Penn, the article's author, even cites some of our own numbers, though the most astonishing number he arrives at is that America is now home to over 452,000 professional bloggers who use blogging as their primary source of income. If these numbers are indeed true, then that would mean that there are now almost as many bloggers in the U.S. as lawyers (550,000). We do, however, have our doubts.

According to a new report by Entertainment Media Research, a London-based media consultancy firm, YouTube users in the U.S. clearly see the popular streaming video site as the default destination for streaming video content. While the researchers found that users expect brands to have a presence on YouTube, however, most users also said that they did not want to see any additional ads on the service, and over 50% stated that they preferred the site when it was less commercialized.

Facebook, the social network juggernaut that once started out as a closed social network for college students, not only has become a mainstream phenomenon, but it is also attracting more and more older users. Over the last 60 days, according to data from Inside Facebook, the number of users over 35 doubled, and the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is women over 55. The majority of Facebook users are now over 25.

Looking at a regular graph of traffic data from Digg and Facebook, it would be easy to assume that Digg is lagging far behind Facebook's staggering growth. However, Compete just produced a very different graph that compares traffic at Digg and Facebook since their respective launches, and according to this data, Digg is actually doing better than Facebook. Facebook is obviously older than Digg, so while it has more traffic now, Digg's growth since its inception has actually been faster than Facebook's.