Finalists: Top 10 Social Media Blogs 2011

We received over 330 nominations for our second-annual Top 10 Social Media Blogs contest (the blogosphere’s biggest contest for social media blogs).

The list of 23 finalists is pretty impressive! Take a look for yourself below.

The Judges: Our judges include David Armano (Edelman), Debbie Weil (author, The Corporate Blogging Book) and Rick Calvert (CEO, BlogWorld). They are currently finishing up their reviews of these sites.

Here are the finalists (in alphabetical order):

• Anti Social Media
• Brand Builder
• BrandSavant
• Brian Solis
• Convince & Convert
• DannyBrown
• Grow: Marketing. Social Media. Humanity
• Kikolani
• Kommein
• Mack Collier
• Mark Oborn’s eMarketing
• Michael Brandvold
• Pushing Social
• Reel SEO
• Ricardo Bueno
• Six Pixels of Separation
• Social Media Explorer
• Social Fresh
• SocialMouths
• Social Penguin
• Spin Sucks
• StormDriver
• TopRank

How We’ll Pick the Winners

1. Initial qualification: A blog must have a strong social media focus, must have been nominated multiple times by multiple individuals and must be regularly updated. If someone nominated more than one blog, only the first nomination was counted.

2. Final winner selection:

• Quality of posts: Our judges will examine and score the quality of posts on each blog. Educational and discussion-spurring posts are more valuable than self-promoting posts (55% of decision).
• Frequency of posts: Blogs that feature multiple posts per week will score higher. This is a sign of the blogger’s commitment to blogging (15%).
• Reader involvement: Blogs that have regular comments from readers are another sign of a healthy blog. In addition, the numbers of nominations for a specific blog play a part in this (15%).
• Blog ranking: The number of other blogs that link to the nominated blog shows the value of the content (15%). We’ll use accepted third-party blog ranking systems for this portion of the score.

Congratulations to the finalists! We’ll announce the winners here soon!

What do you think about these blogs? Leave your comments below…