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.

Happy New Year! Time for the first Monday Mashup of the new decade. Here we go.

‘Best Job’ winner stung by jellyfish
Loosely translated, the German word ‘schadenfreude’ describes the pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others.

Which brings me to the news that the winner of Australia’s “Best Job in the World” contest has survived a sting from a potentially deadly jellyfish just days before the end of his dream stint on the Great Barrier Reef.

You may recall that Ben Southall beat over 34,000 competitors to land the six-month job as “caretaker” of Hamilton Island, Australia where he published the Island Caretaker Blog. The campaign gained international notoriety and bagged a number of awards, including two top awards at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival this summer.

Twitalyzer 2.0 Launched
This weekend Twitalyzer shed its BETA status and officially opened the application to the public. This application allows you to analyse an account in detail, and also provides access to a dashboard, which “provides access to great new Twitalyzer features including tracking for multiple accounts, Google Analytics integration, user tagging and segmentation tools.” If you want to get the most out of the app then download and read the Twitalyzer Handbook, a 50 page user’s guide to the application.

Social Media is the New Super Bowl: Pepsi Refresh and What It Means to Marketers
The big marketing news across the pond over the past couple of weeks was Pepsi’s decision to trade Super Bowl advertising for social media activity in 2010:

For the first time in 23 years–23 years!–the brand will not be purchasing a Super Bowl spot.  Instead, it is sinking $20M into a Social Media program called Pepsi Refresh. The Pepsi Refresh site will allow people to vote for worthwhile community projects, and Pepsi expects to sponsor thousands of local efforts via this program.

The Forrester Blog for Marketing Leadership Professionals unravels what it means for marketers, and considers the ramifications for the industry.  The post is worth a read, and Pepsi’s decision is worth following.

Tories ‘would pay £1m for public policy making website’
Tory frontbencher Jeremy Hunt last week told the BBC that the Conservatives would offer a £1m prize in a competition to develop a website that would allow large groups of people to help develop new policies.

If implemented, this would be a groundbreaking approach to create a platform to crowdsource public policy ideas. Although perhaps they could offer 10 prizes of 100k each for 10 different approaches – after all, that’s still a substantial reward for a lone developer, and how are you going to know what works until you put it in practice?

Wipe The Slate Clean For 2010, Commit Web 2.0 Suicide
If you are looking for an online detox, this is for you. Moddr, a New Media Lab in Rotterdam have developed The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine which effectively disconnects you from social networks completely:

Just put in your credentials for Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or LinkedIn and it will delete all your friends and messages, and change your username, password, and photo so that you cannot log back in.

A light hearted video describes the benefits of committing Web 2.0 suicide, but this is probably not recommended for anyone working in this industry as this ‘will really delete your online presence and is irrevocable.’

You’ve been warned.

Update: Facebook blocks ‘Web 2.0 Suicide Machine’
Oh dear…

Social networks are making people more likely to complain online
LexisNexis last week announced the results of a survey that should make brand managers / online marketers / customer service departments take notice:

• Just over half polled said that if they are unhappy with something they have bought or used they will complain about it online
• 60% of people have chosen not to buy or use a product or service after reading negative comments about them online
• 67% of complainants made online were ignored, leaving customers to act as detractors online

The lesson is that companies who fail to monitor their brand online are missing an important opportunity to turn unhappy customers around, or gain new ones if negative comments aren’t addressed.

PR community split over paying bloggers in PRWeek poll
A straw poll run on PR Week about whether it is acceptable to pay bloggers for favourable coverage divided the PR community last week. 57 per cent agreed that it was unethical to pay blogger, but “a significant minority (43 per cent) believed that it was acceptable for bloggers to accept such payments”. A surprising finding indeed, and Robin was quoted in the article responding:

The results of the PRWeek poll only show the naivety towards social media in the PR industry; they haven’t got their heads round it and aren’t set up for it.

ITV.com on social media and engagement
This interview with ITV’s social media manager Ben Ayers makes for an interesting read, as he discusses key platforms used by ITV to get closer to fans (notably Facebook and Twitter) and his views on future growth areas for social media in general. Listening to the opinions of fans and feeding this back into production is a core element of ITV’s online activity, as is working with a wide variety of stakeholders (web editors, operations teams, show producers) in order to maintain their social media presences.

The Battle of Big Thinking
Last week was Campaign and APG’s Battle of Big Thinking at the British Library, an annual event where leading strategists compete for the coveted ‘biggest thinker’ prize. We Are Social’s very own Sandrine Plasseraud was up against Jeremy Ettinghausen, digital publisher at Penguin and VCCP’s Amelia Torrode. In case you missed it, Gordon Macmillan, Haymarket’s social media & international editor, captured it all in his ‘live blog’ of the day.

Study: Inc. 500 CEOs Aggressively Use Social Media for Business
The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth conducted a study for the third year in a row, about the usage of social media among Inc. 500 companies. Respondents were asked about their usage and familiarity with six types of social media tools (blogging, podcasting, online video, social networking, message boards, and wikis) and according to the study, social media usage has definitely grown in the last year:

• 91% of companies (compared to 77% in 2008) reported that they use at least one social media tool

Some other interesting finds:

• 44 percent of companies without a company blog say they plan to start one
• 34 percent of companies reported that they were using social media to communicate with vendors and suppliers

The key takeaway is that smaller organizations are innovating with social media marketing strategies, as there is more room to “for innovation because it requires less processes to adopt”.

LinkedIn hits 3 million members in the UK
Professional social networking site LinkedIn reached an important milestone last week, when it announced they’ve racked up 3 million members in the UK on the company’s blog.

We’ve watched the British professional community take to the site with the sort of industrious enthusiasm that typifies the way business is done in this country.

On that note, perhaps this is a good time to mention our LinkedIn group?

Twitter Declared Most Popular English Word of 2009
And last but not least, the Global Language Monitor, which tracks language trends, declared Twitter this year’s Most Popular Word in English… Enough said.

It’s time for We Are Social’s Monday Mashup, a quick round up of research, news and case studies that caught our eye over the last week and we thought were worth sharing. Here’s our pick of some of the web’s finest.

Crowdsourcing advertising – can it work?
A fine post by Amelia Torode about Peperami’s decision to crowdsource their latest interactive advertising campaign. It calls into question the monetary reward being offered, the inadvertent creative role that Idea Bounty has taken in vetting a manageable number of ideas for the client to chose from, and the implications for agencies:

Maybe it just troubles me as the logical conclusion of an initiative like this is that you don’t need agencies anymore, you simply crowdsource the creative ideas cheaply and then partner with production houses.

The post kicked off a lengthy discussion in the comments section, so get a cup of tea and start scrolling. It’s worth the read.

Trouble At Twitter: U.S. Visitors Down 8 Percent In October
Twitter’s explosive growth of 1271% from October 08 – October 09 was bound to slow down eventually, but recent numbers from comScore have demonstrated that last month “the number of people who visited Twitter.com from the U.S. actually declined for the first time by 8 percent month-over-month”.

Twitter has been working furiously to make its website better by rolling out the new Retweet button, Lists, and Geolocation features. As Twitter loses ground in its home market (and Facebook keeps moving ‘further and further ahead’) the question is whether the new changes will be enough to reverse this downward trend?

LinkedIn works with Twitter, and vice versa
Last week LinkedIn and Twitter announced a partnership that allows your LinkedIn status to show up as a tweet when you set it, or for a tweet to also appear as your LinkedIn status.  The rationale? “Because when you’re trying to get something done, you want Twitter and LinkedIn to work together”.

In effect, the move is meant to save you time while you promote your professional identity across the web and cut out having to login on multiple platforms to share the same status/message.  And crucially, you can be selective about what appears in your LinkedIn profile i.e. you can set LinkedIn so that all your tweets appear, or only those with the hashtag #in.

SideWiki changes everything
If you haven’t been keeping up with Google’s SideWiki innovation, this post is a good place to start. PR guru Mark Borkowski considers the impact that SideWiki will have on reputation management and PR on the web.

Few people in PR, it seems, have considered the way that SideWiki will change the lives of beleaguered PR folk. In time, this tool will significantly change the way brands strategise, think and exist. SideWiki is going to challenge PR by providing the masses with the tool for the ultimate expression of people power, something uncontainable that will need constant monitoring.

A sweeping statement? Yes, but read on.

Did CoTweet just take Twitter’s business model, and future customers?
Twitter’s usefulness and exceptional growth are as legendary as its lack of revenue stream and business model. The key question here: “what happens if Twitter takes too long and third parties take over the market?”

CoTweet might be doing just that, and the startup has recently launched a paid for service to allow clients to “reach and engage customers using Twitter.” Econsultancy examines the diminishing market opportunity for Twitter, as 3rd parties like CoTweet develop direct commercial relationships with brands and advanced tools for them to manage their relationships online.

People open to marketing in social media
This is reassuring news for those who, say, work for social media agencies.

Performics conducted a survey of more than 3,000 U.S. consumers, which “comprised 100+ questions to determine how various segments of consumers use social networks in their daily lives, specifically in regard to finding out about different types of products and in relation to other media channels”.

The study found an immense opportunity for gaining customers and growing sales so long as marketers “communicate relevant messages in consumers’ language and on their terms”.

The Connected Brands Index
Last week iCrossing introduced the Connected Brands Index, some research out of the US designed to measure a brand’s effectiveness online “not just on their own properties, but also across search and social media”.

According to iCrossing, a successful online brand is made up of five key attributes – visibility, usefulness, usability, desirability, and engagement – which can be measured by looking at 65 different metrics.

This research does not tell you what the most connected brands on the web are, but looks at the top 10 global brands according to the Interbrand study and should serve as future reference for benchmarking. Download the full research here.

Shane Richmond, The Telegraph’s Communities Editor, asked me to guest post on his blog while he’s away on holiday, on the theme of a “social media to do list for 2009″. I thought I’d take a shot at compiling a list of five social media New Year’s resolutions that apply to all businesses, large and small. Go and have a read, and let me know what you think.