For those who aren’t regular readers of StickyFigure (if you’re not, you should be. Check it out), Steve Woodruff has been consistently churning out great discoveies with his Five in the Morning series. Five in the Morning is basically a blog post that highlights 5 of the most interesting and well written posts throughout the blogosphere.

Lately Steve has been inviting guests to add some new perspective and fresh content to the mix. When he approached me about being a guest author, I immediately said yes! So without any further ado, here is your daily dose of Five in the Morning:

Digital media continues to blur our online and offline lives. Spruce up your presentations and educate your colleagues with this fantastic list of 49 Amazing Social Media, Web 2.0 and Internet Stats, compiled by Adam Singer on the FutureBuzz blog.

Learn how to use a often overlooked feature of Twitter, “favorites”. Darren Rowse and Ari Herzog put together an excellent post on the Twitip blog that reveals how to use favorites, why you should use favorites, and illustrates how other people are using them.

It’s early, but one of the themes of 2009 seems to be “stop talking. start doing”. Shiv Singh, of Avenue A Razorfish, reminds brands of this and says Brands Must Do! Start doing by listening to consumers. It’s not done enough.

The ultimate do-it-yourselfer Marshall Kirkpatrick has outlined how to Build the Ultimate Social Media Cheat Sheet. Use it to get you up to speed on the social media activity in your market.

And finally, take these tips from The Difficult Art of Cold Pitching by Jon Burg, and apply them to avoid any mistakes when reaching out with a request to a community of people you have a weak relationship with. Chris Brogan even chimes in with his take.

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For those of you looking to efficiently deal with web 2.0 and social media information overload, here is a solution. Daniel Smith, author of the Smithereens blog, recently put together a great step-by-step article on how to use Google Reader as your personal “Web Brain”.  Check it out.

I just found an interesting Twitter site called Tweet Stats, that will report on a Twitter username’s stats and graph them in the following categories:

• Tweets per hour
• Tweets per month
• Tweet timeline

Do you Twitter? If you’re reading this blog, you probably know all about Twitter. Even though I registered a Twitter account some time ago, I’ve more recently become an active user. I’m enjoying the benefits of keeping up with the happenings of key people, both professionally and personally, but I’m also having difficulty getting other friends to join and use the service. Despite my own personal experiences, Twitter appears to be growing the user base quickly. As reported on over at the Twitter Facts blog, the data shows just that, Twitter.com is rapidly approaching 1 million users.

So far my twittering is limited only to the indivudals in my social circle that are as heavily involved in interactive and the web as I am. I just haven’t found the sweet spot yet where Twitter is reaching the general masses (the ones not online the majority of their waking hours) among my social circle.

Question of the day: Who among your social circle uses Twitter? Professional contacts? Friends? Family?