The list is comprised of social writers whose networks are most active and identifiable. This is not the same as having millions of followers on Twitter. These are people who write about social media, predicting trends, influencing where things go in the future. Some standouts from the list include:

#1 – Chris Brogan @chrisbrogan – Author of “Social Media 101: Tactics and Tips to Develop Your Business Online”.

Today, I declared war. – ow.ly/8GbuB

— Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) January 25, 2012

#3 – Guy Kawasaki @guykawasaki – Early Apple employee who really pushed the Mac; went on to venture capital and found Alltop.

Turnover and tech should be top concerns in 2012 is.gd/OtzVRw

— Guy Kawasaki (@GuyKawasaki) January 25, 2012

#4 – Gary Vaynerchuk @garyvee – Wine connoisseur, video blogger, author of “Crush It! Why Now is the Time to Cash in on your Passion”

Wild how content lives, I got 4 separate emails about this episode in the last 6 hours! I love the world we live in plus.google.com/11131099099124…

— Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee) January 24, 2012

#6 – Robert Scoble @scobleizer – Uber-Blogger. Formerly with Microsoft, Fast Company. Currently with Rackspace.

Lots of great tweets from Davos are pouring in: twitter.com/#!/search/Davos

— Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer) January 25, 2012

Forbes Media and a consulting firm known as the Reputation Institute awarded Amazon that spot after surveying almost 33,000 consumers in January and February.  Amazon earned the highest score out of the 150 largest U.S. companies included in the study, which is quite an accomplishment.

Anthony Johndrow, a managing partner at the Reputation Institute, observed in a statement, “The reputation economy of 2011 is characterized by a heightened focus on three things: trust in companies and leaders rather than product brands, multiple stakeholders and their interactions, and building a connection between a company’s reputation strategy and its business strategy.”

Anyway, second and third place went to Kraft Foods and Johnson & Johnson, if you’re curious, and moving onto companies we cover on a regular basis, Google managed to place ninth.

Then Apple and Microsoft finished side by side much farther down the list in 46th and 47th places, while eBay came in 81st, not far behind Best Buy (at 78th).

Congrats to Jeff Bezos and the entire Amazon team.  Congrats to Amazon’s shareholders, too, for that matter, considering the company’s stock rose 1.28 percent today.

Google’s stock fell 3.16 percent as shareholders still appear to be nervous due to Larry Page taking over as CEO.

Atop the heap is Mexico’s Carlos Slim Helu, who added $20.5 billion to his fortune, more than any other billionaire. The telecom mogul, who gets 62% of his fortune from America Movil , is now worth $74 billion and has pulled far ahead of his two closest rivals. Bill Gates, No. 2, and Warren Buffett, No. 3, both added a more modest $3 billion to their piles and are now worth $56 billion and $50 billion, respectively. Gates, who now gets 70% of his fortune from investments outside of Microsoft, has actually been investing in the Mexican stock market and has holdings in Mexican Coke bottler Femsa and Grupo Televisa.

The top 20 are:

1. Carlos Slim Helú & family
2. Bill Gates
3. Warren Buffett
4. Bernard Arnault
5. Larry Ellison
6. Lakshmi Mittal
7. Amancio Ortega
8. Eike Batista
9. Mukesh Ambani
10. Christy Walton & family
11. Li Ka-shing
12. Karl Albrecht
13. Stefan Persson
14. Vladimir Lisin
15. Liliane Bettencourt
16. Sheldon Adelson
17. David Thomson & Family
18. Charles Koch
19. David Koch
20. Jim Walton

View the slideshow here.

While Facebook may have spawned six billionaires, as Forbes says, none of them made the top 20 – Mark Zuckerberg included. He was named the youngest self-made billionaire last year, however. He also pledged to give the majority of his wealth to charity.

The company received high ratings for its fun, relaxed work culture. CEO and Chairman Patrick M. Byrne earned a 92% employee approval rating, the highest of any retailer on this list.

"This ranking is a very nice recognition for our company culture," said Overstock.com President Jonathan Johnson.

"We focus on making Overstock.com a place that our employees look forward to coming to each day. Our motto is ‘We save people money,’ and we have a lot of fun doing it. It is great working at a place where people put aside office politics and just get the job done. This award is a reflection of how Patrick cultivates the Overstock.com culture from the top down."

Glassdoor.com compiled a list of the "Best Retailers to Work For" for Forbes. The survey ranked employers based on criteria such as "career opportunities," "communication," "compensation & benefits" and "employee morale." Collected from current and employee feedback since June 2008, the study ranked brands that had at least 20 reviews or more over the last 30 months.

The study found that despite the drop, online banking still faired better than offline banking channels and most other online industries with the score of 80 considered to be the threshold for excellence.

"Despite everything that’s gone on in the financial sector over the past several years, including a stumbling economy, bailouts, and credit freezes, financial institutions have turned to their websites as a way to maintain and even increase customer loyalty," said Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results.

"While the dip in score could predict more trouble for the recovery, it also shows that the online channel continues to be the most effective marketing channel for banks and credit unions."

The five largest banks in the country (Bank of America, Citibank, Chase, PNC, and Wells Fargo) scored the lowest in the study, while credit unions tend to have the highest online customer satisfaction scores. However, with all financial institution categories scoring higher than 80, online banking (81) is providing more satisfaction than offline banking (75).

"When it comes to customer satisfaction, big banks, with relatively unlimited resources, are not performing as well as smaller institutions with fewer resources," added Freed.

"While the big companies try to outdo each other with lots of flashy bells and whistles, the small banks have had to keep their focus on satisfying the customer because that’s the only way they can compete. And as the data shows, it’s paid off."

The study also found highly satisfied online banking and credit union customers report being:

*56% more likely to purchase additional products and services and 65% more likely to increase online bill payment.

*64% more likely to use the website as the main way for interacting with the bank

*76% more likely to recommend the bank overall and 63% more likely to recommend the bank’s website.
 

He had some interesting things to say, with his main point essentially being that online publishers are driving down the prices of ads by adhering to a similar model that the airlines have used by offering lower rates when they need to fill spots. Naturally, in that industry, consumers wait as long as they can to get the lower rates, and it has not worked out the best.

Spanfeller says that as publishers have adopted a similar model with advertising, they have changed the success of metrics from ones based on "demand creation" to ones driven by "demand fulfillment."

"Until recently, we had seen the growing use of ad networks to ‘liquidate’ the unsold remnant inventory that was [the] result of people spending more and more time online while the ad-dollar migration from offline failed to keep pace," said Spanfeller. "The IAB (where I’m chairman emeritus) and Bain Consulting did a study on this about a year ago that showed a huge increase in the percentage of inventory sold via ad networks on a sample of seven member sites (5% to 30% increase in just one year)." 

"What this study also showed, though, was the incredibly low amount of revenue that these impressions garnered as the pricing for inventory sold in this manner was outlandishly low (less than 2% of total ad revenue was generated by these impressions and the pricing from ad networks has fallen even further since this study was done)," he continued. 

Spanfeller’s piece should prove to be an interesting one to publishers and advertisers alike, but some think it is just simply too late for the industry to adopt a different model. Publishers that try to go a different way face the very real possibility that their advertisers won’t follow them, when they can simply get lower rates elsewhere.

The survey found that 65 percent of individual investors consider the Internet their most important source of investing information. This is an increase from 52 percent in 2005.

Close to half (47%) of investors spend 20 or more hours per week online and 54 percent spent more time on the Web in 2008.

Twenty-nine percent spent less time reading daily newspapers, 37 percent spent less time watching television, and 32 percent spent less time listening to the radio, compared to only 3 percent who spent less time online.

Newspapers were cited by 17 percent of respondents as the most important source of investing information, down from 20 percent in 2005.

Among financial advisors 68 percent consider the Internet as their most important source of investing information.

Half said they spent more time on the Internet in 2008 and 39 percent spend 20 hours or more per week online.

"In these turbulent times, the need for up-to-date business information is more critical than ever. These two studies further underscore the trend where more affluent investors and business decision makers are looking to the Web as their primary source of business information," said Jim Spanfeller, President and CEO of Forbes.com.
 

[Via GoogleWatchBlog.]

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For “normal” people these problems are real, however with Google a double standard exists for trusted authority websites.

Case and point the SERP for [Green Real Estate] screen shot below:

The #7 listing goes to this page on Forbes.com

The #10 listing goes to this page on MSN.com

Ok first off I don’t mean to imply that MSN is scraping Forbes, I’m quite sure there is a syndication arrangement in place and no copyright laws are being broken.

However the content is identical, so identical that Google should have no problem realizing one is a copy of the other, however they don’t. The simple fact is that right now trust and authority are weighted so high within the algo that they completely trump all other factors.

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Social media specifically refers to blogging, podcasting, using message boards, social networking, video blogging and wikis. 46% of the charities report that social media is a key part of the organizations fund raising efforts (though they do not measure success by numbers – they seem to use the tools more for branding purposes).

Social media is an effective way to increase awareness of their missions and helps them connect with their constituencies. The research did not trace how this affected donations because the organizations mainly used it to build community and foster their online presence.

The findings came from the University of Massachusetts–Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research. They conducted a nationwide telephone survey of nonprofits named by Forbes Magazine to their list of the 200 largest US charities for 2006 under the direction of researchers Eric Mattson and Nora Ganim Barnes. Seventy-six of the charities gave detailed interviews.

The charities are especially outpacing businesses when it comes to podcasting and though less utilize video, the ones who are use it heavily. They are also blogging. Charities blog at a higher rate than businesses on the Fortune and Inc. 500 lists, with more than a third of the organizations. Compare that to just 8% of Fortune 500 businesses and 19% of businesses on the Inc. 500 list.

I did a little research myself and found that the number one charity (measured by revenue) is the Mayo Clinic which maintains two blogs—including a blog on stress. Maybe some of usought to add that to our list of RSS feeds .

The United Way has three blogs as well as blogs at regional offices I didn’t find blogs for the Salvation Army, American Red Cross, Catholic Charities, or Habitat for Humanity (however they do link to blogs written by others associated with their organization). The ones I looked at didn’t seem to be utilizing social bookmarking or advanced functionality on their blogs.

See the full report in part three of the three-part series: http://www.umassd.edu/cmr/studies/cmrblogstudy4.pdf

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