Like many of you this week, we've been "closing the books" on 2011 and it's been a very good year for Social Media Today.
Based on the lessons we've learned in past years of working with clients like SAP, Siemens, DuPont, Teradata, Microsoft and others, we launched a new "campaign" offering for marketers interested in accessing our database of members across our various communities.
We doubled our staff, hiring some cracker-jack former journalists and energetic, customer-focused community marketing staff. We ended the year decidedly in the black, but making sure that we delivered value through our team and not through a lot of wasted expense.
We grew our combined site traffic by 85%.
We provided more opportunities for our bloggers by sending them as ambassadors to places like Taipei, Taiwan and Hanover, Germany, by commissioning more original content, and by adding new features like our "blogger baseball card" to their posts. We've also started development on a major new tool for bloggers which we're launching early next year that will simply knock your socks off.
We launched Social Media Today's "Smartest Thinking" series of webinars, which included Maggie Fox and other assorted guest hosts like Eric Schwartzman, Lauren Simonds, and Brent Leary, as well as nearly 5,000 people who registered for live Q and A. We just started back on January 10, with Sandy Carter from IBM talking to Maggie.
We participated in Social Week in New York, hosting a breakfast with the irrepressible Clay Shirky and IBM's Saul Berman, Global Lead Partner and VP. Check out the videos of the event here.
And we launched SalesChaos TV, Playaz Video, Smart Thinker Webinar Series, and Hands-On Training with Eric Schwartzman.
In May of this year, we were also proud to be a sponsor of the Women's Refugee Commission's annual, "Voices of Courage" luncheon in New York. We will also be on board to help bring about this important event in 2012.
I'd like to thank each of you for, at the very least, reading this report. But I'd also like to invite you, if you haven't already, to blog, comment and become part of one of our ten ongoing conversations, happening non-stop on our sites, our facebook pages, our linkedin group and on twitter @socialmedia2day. Please let me know your thoughts about how we can tap our growing resources to achieve your business goals in 2012. Finally, I hope you have a happy, and prosperous, new year.