It’s time for We Are Social’s Monday Mashup, our pick of some of the web’s finest social media developments.

PleaseRobMe.com reveals dangers of social networks
If you’re a heavy user of Foursquare and Twitter, you might want to take notice of PleaseRobMe.com. The website made the headlines by highlighting in real-time the whereabouts of people who checked in on Foursquare and shared their location on the web via Twitter. The goal of the three Dutch developers who set up the site was to highlight the dangers of publicly telling others your location on the Internet because it “ leaves one place you’re definitely not… home.”

The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc. Because all this site is, is a dressed up Twitter search page. Everybody can get this information.

Facebook become America’s second most popular website, beating Yahoo!
Compete.com revealed that Facebook had surpassed Yahoo as America’s second most popular website.  Facebook drew nearly 134 Million unique visitors in January 2010, compared to Yahoo’s 132 Million visitors.

While traffic figures are important, the blog notes that the real story is around user engagement and on this front Facebook wins hands down:

Check out how monthly Attention (time spent on Facebook.com as a percentage of all time spent online each month) ramps over the past year for Facebook, while both Yahoo and Google show a decrease. In January, 11.6% of all time spent online was spent on Facebook (compared to 4.25% for Yahoo and 4.1% for Google).

The recent launch of Google Buzz is no doubt aimed at eating into the amount of time that users spend on Facebook, but time will tell if Google can be successful here.

MySpace real-time search goes live on Google
MySpace announced on their blog that Google search now picks up publicly available updates from MySpace users in real-time.

… when you search for anything on Google, as part of your search results you will see live updates from MySpace users, including news, photos, and blog posts that they have chosen to publically publish. Further, all of these updates will be ranked to reflect the freshest, most relevant results, making it easier to find the latest information on anything you’re searching for on Google, including the music and artists you enjoy most.

MySpace now joins Twitter as one of the services that are now live in Google’s real-time search, announced last year.

Outlook gets social with LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace
Microsoft announced a number of major developments for Outlook, including a public beta of LinkedIn for Outlook and partnerships with both Facebook and MySpace. The highlights of LinkedIn for Outlook include:

• The ability to connect to your LinkedIn account directly from within your Inbox, and add connections
• The ability to view status updates and photos from connections next to an e-mail message they have sent
• The ability to receive automatic updates to Outlook contact information directly from LinkedIn
• The ability to synchronise mobile contact information with information from LinkedIn

Meanwhile, the Facebook and MySpace partnerships for Outlook 2010 will enable users to more easily connect co-workers and colleagues, as well as friends and family within their Outlook Inbox.

The LinkedIn public beta is available now, and Facebook for Outlook and MySpace for Outlook will be available later this year as the official release of Office 2010 approaches.

Recruitment consultants find digital skills in short supply within PR industry
PR recruitment agency Major Players last week told PRWeek that there is a shortfall in candidates with a general understanding of social media. After analyzing a sample of 4,500 CVs from the past two years, only:

• 6% referenced social media
• 9% mentioned Twitter
• 2% talked about blogging
• 13% included ‘Facebook’ – although in some this was merely highlighted in the ‘interests’ section

This stands in fairly stark contrast to the current need for digital skills in the industry “with around 33 per cent of recruitment searches by employers being for digital and social media expertise, while a further 28 per cent require a general understanding of social media, generally in consumer roles.”

Privacy no longer a social norm, says Facebook founder
The rise of social networking online means that people no longer have an expectation of privacy, according to Facebook founder and billionaire Mark Zuckerberg.

Speaking at the Crunchie awards in San Francisco recently, he suggested that the rise of social media reflected the changing attitudes of ordinary people online. Though a great number of people are choosing to share more information online, the degree to which ‘privacy is no longer a social norm’ is debatable.  Check out the full article in the Guardian, which sums up Facebook’s moves in recent to bring more information into the public domain, and the adverse reactions that followed.

Social Media and the Haiti crisis
Following last week’s tragic earthquake in Haiti, social media played a significant role in raising awareness and getting aid donations from individuals across the world. Below are a few impressive ways in which web and mobile technology have been deployed in the past week to bring the tragedy to light.

• Photos posted on Twitter shortly after the devastating 7.0 quake swept across the web causing an outpouring of support
• Twitter and Facebook users respond to Haiti crisis helping raise $35m in donations in 48 hours for the the American Red Cross
• Google worked with satellite imaging company GeoEye to make available accurate aerial imagery to help humanitarian aid get where it needs to be most
• Apple created an iTunes donation page [iTunes link] to allow users to donate money to the Red Cross directly from iTunes.

If you haven’t already done so, you can donate to relief efforts via UNICEF or the International Committee of the Red Cross.

PostRank Top Blogs of 2009
PostRank last week announced their list of the most engaged, most influential and ‘biggest mover and shaker’ blogs of the last year.

To create the list, they gathered and analyzed over 2 billion individual engagement activities on 20 social hubs, (e.g. Twitter, Digg, Delicious) and ranked 15,725 blogs in 491 topics. Check out the Top Blogs of 2009 here. Each topic contains a ranked list of blogs, along with each blog’s engagement profile and top posts for all of 2009.

Yelp takes on Foursquare with new iPhone check-ins
In the latest version of its iPhone App, Yelp has added the ability for users to “check-in” and share their location with friends, similar to what you can do on services like Foursquare. Unlike Foursquare though, users don’t compete to become the only mayor of a single location, but can become ‘regulars.’ We wonder whether removing the ‘game’ element will affect user uptake and the incentive to check in. That said, Yelp have an existing userbase of about 1.25 million people per month. Some key features include:

• Friends can see a list of all of your check-ins
• You can bring up a map of nearby check-ins
• Post your check-ins on Twitter
• Businesses can offer promotions and discounts to their regulars

Google launches real-time, social web search
You might have noticed that Google looks a bit different, since announcing last week a couple of very important developments in the area of real-time search.

Google search results now include breaking news headlines, live updates from popular social networks, and blog posts published just seconds before. And the move is fully supported by the ‘who’s who’ of social networking: Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca and Twitter.

Forrester: Traditional agencies can’t do digital
A new study from Forrester last week highlighted the complexity of the interactive marketing landscape and the challenges this poses for marketers, and to traditional agencies:

Forrester interviewed about 100 global interactive marketers for the study. Only 23% thought their “traditional brand agency” could effectively plan and manage interactive marketing activities. About 46% thought they couldn’t do it, and the rest didn’t have an opinion either way.

Forrester expects the digital agency space to fragment even more with clients working with specialist agenices in areas such as mobile and social media.

Habbo Hotel launches conversation tracking tool
Habbo Hotel, the virtual world for teens with around 14 million monthly unique visitors, has launched a conversation measurement tool for the site called  ‘Habble’. This offers marketers a chance to understand what users are saying about their brands, slogans and key phrases over a defined period.

The tool has been developed to help brands advertising in the hotel and is used in conjunction with click-through rates, time spent and impressions. Brands not advertising within the virtual world can also use Habble to understand what type of conversations are taking place about them.

Germany’s StudiVZ adds support for 3rd party apps

Two and a half years after Facebook, its German clone StudiVZ follows the US social network’s most successful move by adding support for third-party applications.

Nine apps are available as of today and several hundreds are in development.

What sets this development apart is the emphasis that is being placed on privacy. Germany has some of the toughest online privacy laws in the world and CEO Markus Berger-de León has applied tight security policies to third-party apps “to avoid the type of scams that TechCrunch recently dug up on Facebook and MySpace.”

So, here’s the big one, does spending on social media really pay back? A fresh MBA graduate from MIT, Niki Gomez, passing through London and We Are Social on her way to Mumbai, gives her views.

At last, a study quantifies what many of us felt must be true, that social media does translate into increased sales. As Violette mentioned last week, a study by Wetpaint and Charlene Li’s Altimeter Group shows an extremely strong correlation between engaging in different social media and earning higher revenues. The study looks at the engagement of top 100 brands from the 2008 BusinessWeek/Interbrand Best Global Brands report and ranks them from 1 to 127, based on how they use social media channels. It finds that the top brands with their rankings in brackets are:

1. Starbucks (127)
2. Dell (123)
3. eBay (115)
4. Google (105)
5. Microsoft (103)
6. Thomson Reuters (101)
7. Nike (100)
8. Amazon (88)
9. SAP (86)
10. Tie – Yahoo!/Intel (85)

The most engaged brands experienced revenue growth in 2008 of 18% whilst the least engaged brands experienced losses of negative 6% over the same period.

Also interesting is that only arguably half of these are internet companies. The study categorizes the brands, a la Malcolm Gladwell, into mavens, those heavily engaging in 7 or more channels, such as Starbucks and Dell; butterflies, such as American Express and Hyundai who engage with seven channels but with less engagement; selectives who engage in six or less but do some on a deep level such as H&M and Philips; wallflowers like BP and McDonalds who engage with six or less but with a light touch. My question was whether social media pays off because of lower marketing spend, as there is a shift from spending on more traditional channels. However it seems, revenues, actual sales are up on previous years, even boom times!

Their findings conclude that it is not how many social media channels you use, but how deep that engagement is: so being social pays, but it’s the quality rather than quantity of these conversations that seems to triumph yet again. So, please think before you tweet… a good piece of advice for brands and individuals alike.