Today, were rounding up this week’s top social media stories from around the web. As the year comes to a close, the web has provided an abundance of data analysis of trends, news, and events that have shaped 2012. From the 2012 Summer Olympics, SOPA, Curiosity Rover, U.S Presidential Election and Superstorm Sandy, social media has captured and shared the global pulse of humanity.

Here at DataSift, we live and breathe all things social data. We are constantly amazed by the pioneers who are manipulating that data in extraordinary ways that promote innovations we never thought possible and get especially excited about those who use big data for the greater good of humanity.
That’s why we enjoyed our interview with Jake Porway, Founder and Executive Director of DataKind, a non-profit organization that brings together data scientists and social organizations to correlate big data and provide solutions about global social issues.

The recent launch of our re-syndication partnership with bitly allows us to see the connections between conversations and clicks like never before. Using simple analysis techniques to delve into rich data sets we are able to identify key influencer events, local variations in interests and which companies are best able to ride the wave of excitement around a breaking story.
When focusing on the week leading up to Skyfall’s U.S. opening on November 9, we discovered that people from 180 countries visited more than 2,300 different websites discussing Skyfall, covering reviews, trailers, interviews, the soundtrack and other angles.

Your company’s level of social influence has a huge impact on how users trust and take to your brand. Of course, you need to build trust first in order to actually grow your influence. Sounds like a chicken and the egg scenario, wouldn’t you say? Follow these 7 steps and you’ll learn exactly how to build trust and grow your social influence simultaneously

Earlier this week, IBM published a report that claimed that social traffic from sites like Twitter and Facebook only had a negligible effect on traffic to online retailers. Considering the massive flood of Tweets, Facebook Likes, and bitly clicks that all of us at DataSift saw about these major shopping events in our feeds, I was surprised by IBM’s findings and think they may have given marketers the very wrong impression that social traffic wasn’t important…

Check out our latest Infographic: Whether you were first in line at the mall by 8pm on Thanksgiving day, avoided the crowds with a CyberMonday online shopping spree or just spent a quiet weekend checking your Twitter and Facebook feeds, Black Friday deals were probably an inescapable part of your holiday weekend.

As a Big Data platform for social, we’re continually working on how we can extend the value of insights that companies can derive from social data. Today we’re excited to announce our resyndication partnership with bitly (you can read the full announcement here) – bringing the social clickstream into our platform and integrating it to enable entirely new ways to analyze and act on social data insights.

We had the pleasure of being a sponsor at GigaOM’s Structure: Europe 2012, a 2-day event that housed the leaders in cloud computing. Throughout the event, we spoke with numerous attendees about their perspective on Big data trends and the cloud SaaS model in Europe. Here are the highlights we wanted to share with you.