*Originally posted Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Until five minutes ago, I had never heard of Ning.com, Hi5.com, FuBar.com, or UrbanChat.com … but apparently almost 9 million unique visitors (8,853,003) have, and visit these sites regularly.  That is a LOT of social networking taking place “offsite” (and by that I mean independent of the networking giants Facebook and MySpace).  I have accounts on four of the top five social networking sites and have heard of / done research on another 10 of them.  The remaining 11 … no idea where these (and their millions of visitors) came from.

I’ve been thinking about the idea of a “social media expert” lately, and the people who claim to be them.  I imagine it’s pretty hard to both claim your expertise, and have time to publicize that knowledge, let alone use and consult those who need it (aka everyone!).  While social media has never been my primary occupation I can’t imagine there are enough hours in the day to explore, try and analyze all of the different platforms and maintain your “expert” status.  While I aspire to be an expert at something, someday I might try to stick to a more static area of study.  Thoughts? 

For more on the top 25 social networking sites, click here.