SES NYC is fast approaching. My session with Chris Boggs and Lee Odden titled Beyond Linkbait will cover some interesting ideas. I spoke to Chris today to get his take on the idea of going beyond linkbait. One topic he's covering is reciprocal links - good or bad? If done properly, they can still be a good SEO tactic, says Chris. They need to happen naturally and be relevant. He has some great ideas on how to make these links work for SEO and offers examples of what a bad reciprocal link and a good reciprocal link would be. Chris plans to share a case study about creating content for YouTube or other social media sites that is not intended to produce links directly. "We built a peice of content around a game on a client's site with the intention of building buzz and getting bloggers to write it about it and then link to the client’s site where the game is hosted," explained Chris. They've had over 25 000 views on YouTube and a flood of links and traffic to the client's site. Sounds like a hard act to follow! My case study is about The Bounce Test videos and how we took this content and turned it into a serious women's health issue backed by research that got coverage from influential bloggers and mainstream media sites. See you in New York on the 20th March .

Facebook lives! Reports of Facebook UK's death? Greatly exaggerated.

Rocketing up the charts in today’s Nielsen social search Top 10 is Facebook, up 712 percent year-over-year. Facebook leapfrogged 15 places in the most popular social media site rankings, winning third place with 8.5 million UK visitors.

YouTube, Facebook and Slide top the list of the most popular and fastest growing social media Web sites in the UK, according to Nielsen Online, a service of The Nielsen Company. Nielsen's data, released today, proves that reports of social media's demise in the UK may be unfounded.

In the UK, 20.8 million people (63 percent of Britons online) visited at least one of the ten most popular social media sites in January 2008. That's a 21 percent increase over last January (17.1 million).

YouTube has replaced Wikipedia as the UK's most popular social media Web site.

Biggest Winners: Facebook and social networking add-on tool, Slide.

Biggest Losers: Friends Reunited and Google Video.

Facebook and Slide broke into the Top 10 by ousting Friends Reunited and Google Video (falling to 16 and 14, respectively, compared to January 2007).

Prediction: Google will retire the Google Video brand and roll it into YouTube by the end of 2008. Both are video search engines. Universal search makes Google Video as a standalone property obsolete.

RIP Google Video: the first Top 20 Web property buried six feet under the World Wide Web?

We'll be tracking whether UK cable TV (MTV Two) can drive traffic and registrations to a social media site. MySpace (News Corp) and MTV (Viacom) will launch a weekly TV music video countdown show (MySpace Chart) only on the U.K. network MTV Two, not to be confused with MTV 2 in the US.

Think TRL with a social twist.

MySpacers and MTV site visitors will be able to vote next week on the top videos ( mtv.co.uk/myspacechart) on MySpace and MTV Two's dedicated landing page.

My Space Chart launch date: March 16. Mark you calendars and start tracking on comScore, Hitwise, and Nielsen.

A complete list of the current MTV Two UK chart toppers after the jump:

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