6 Social Sites Sitting On The Cutting Edge

The BrainYard has just been recognized as the best new business-to-business publication website by min Online, a trade publication for digital media.

Min's Best of the Web Awards program recognized The BrainYard as the best new B2B site and Rodale's Fitbie.com as the best new consumer site. Fitbie is a fitness website co-sponsored by MSN. New site honorable mentions went to The Grindstone, a women's career website, and AtlanticCities.com from the publishers of The Atlantic. The top awards for best digital team went to Saveur and The Atlantic.

At The BrainYard, we're excited to find ourselves in such great company. This website was started just about a year ago as an offshoot of InformationWeek.com, created in partnership with UBM's Enterprise 2.0 conference group. The original press release promised we would deliver "the first Web site community for business and technology leaders who are using and exploring social technology, tools and applications to drive new levels of business performance."

The BrainYard site has grown as the social business market has grown all around it, with ever-intensifying interest around both the marketing, analytic, and customer outreach power of public social media and the emerging potential of social media as a model for collaboration within and between enterprises. We've worked to help our readers understand the importance of those trends and how to make the most of them.

The award recognizes the site for achieving precisely that: "The site has a decidedly how-to emphasis in that the columnists often walk their colleagues through the process of creating collaborative tools and media sharing features across the ever-widening scope of social networks and tools. UBM clearly targeted a market opening and a niche that needed filling. Since its launch in early April, the site has had over 500,000 unique visitors and doubled budgeted revenue."

Many people deserve credit for this success, including some who have played their roles primarily behind the scenes, like Alex Dunne, online general manager for UBM TechWeb, an early champion for the website.

This wouldn't be much of a social media story without some profile pictures, so here are some of the current contributors who deserve a share of the glory, with links to their articles and columns.

Editors

Rob Preston, Vice President and Editor-in-Chief, InformationWeek

Laurianne McLaughlin, Editor-in-Chief, InformationWeek.com

Paul Travis, Managing Editor, InformationWeek.com

David F. Carr, Editor, The BrainYard

Writers and Columnists

Debra Donston-Miller

Eric Lundquist

Thomas Claburn

Venkatesh Rao

Maribel Lopez

Rachel Happe

Alison Diana

Dan Keldsen

Tracy Maurer

Michael Sampson

Follow David F. Carr on Twitter @davidfcarr. The BrainYard is @thebyard and facebook.com/thebyard

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference brings together industry thought leaders to explore the latest innovations in enterprise social software, analytics, and big data tools and technologies. Learn how your business can harness these tools to improve internal business processes and create operational efficiencies. It happens in Boston, June 18-21. Register today!