Meebo, the company that enables real-time social interactions announced that The Hollywood Reporter, a Nielsen Business Media property, will integrate the Meebo Bar into The Hollywood Reporter’s destination website, www.thr.com. Seth Sternberg, founder and CEO of Meebo, Alex Boyce, Online Director with Nielsen Business Media & Entertainment Group, and Nikki Hamedani, Senior Digital Marketing Manager with Nielsen Business Media & Entertainment Group, will demonstrate the new functionality at Meebo’s industry event tonight in San Francisco, CA.

Meebo will enable visitors to The Hollywood Reporter to easily share links, photos, and commentary with their Facebook and Yahoo! friends, Twitter followers, and email contacts, and to discuss the content via private instant messaging without leaving the THR.com platform. Media companies use the Meebo Bar to empower their audience and readers to curate content and send links to the people who are most important to them, and therefore drive new people to their sites. In the coming months, additional Nielsen Business Media properties, including Back Stage, MediaWeek, BrandWeek, and AdWeek, will also begin using the Meebo Bar in their online platforms.

The strategic alliance between Meebo and The Hollywood Reporter marks the release of the latest sharing enhancements since Meebo first introduced drag-and-drop posting of links for content sites in August 2009. Meebo’s platform now includes drag-and-drop headline, text, and link sharing to make posting links even easier for users and more effective as a traffic driver for partners. Beginning today, The Hollywood Reporter can also access new audiences by way of Yahoo! Updates in the Meebo Sharing Dock. When a user posts to Yahoo!, the content link will be sent to Yahoo! Updates in Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, and Yahoo.com. Meebo is also releasing enhanced Meebo Sharing APIs for deeper customization, as well as the Meebo Dashboard for tracking and analyzing the effectiveness of their social sharing campaigns in real time.

“Meebo connects The Hollywood Reporter audience directly to all their friends to enable sharing that is easier to discover and more intuitive for users,” said Seth Sternberg, founder and CEO, Meebo. “The result is audience growth for THR.com as its readers push more and more content links to their peer groups and followers. We’re excited to work with Nielsen Business Media – a smart and savvy organization poised to thrive in the age of new media.”

After adopting Meebo, sites can expect to double the number of links shared and posted by their users, which will have a material impact on traffic growth. The growth of links shared ranges from 15% for early-adopter technology media sites, to as high as 1500% for mainstream media companies and social networks. The continued growth of Meebo’s existing partners and the addition of new partners that have signed up to use Meebo has fueled a 120% increase for Meebo’s U.S. user base in the last 60 days alone. The company now reaches 34 million people in the U.S. on a monthly basis and 94 million globally – up from 15 million in the U.S. and 50 million globally in August, 2009.

In total over 100 leading online publishers are now live with Meebo across their sites as a persistent real-time communications and sharing feature. Meebo syndicates real-time communications and sharing to sites for easy integration as a “social layer” of their sites. The customizable drag-and-drop sharing capabilities are simple to implement and also function elegantly without any extra modifications. Most partners go live within 7 days.

“We’re extremely pleased that Meebo is integrating with Yahoo! Updates to provide The Hollywood Reporter and Meebo’s network of publisher partners with a social distribution channel via Yahoo!,” said Cody Simms, Senior Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Open Strategy. “Over the last year, we’ve been opening up Yahoo! in order to create more and more personally relevant experiences for our users and a massive audience platform for developers and publishers. Meebo’s network of 250 partners will now be able to engage and reach new readers across Yahoo!”

Partners receive revenue via integrated advertising sold by Meebo. Advertisers include AT&T, LG, Microsoft, Paramount, Procter & Gamble, T-Mobile, and Toyota. For more information about ways to work with Meebo, please visit business.meebo.com.