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…

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.”

It’s time for We Are Social’s Monday Mashup, our pick of some of the web’s finest research, news and case studies.

CMOs: Consumers Are Connected. You Need To Be, Too
The prolific Jeremiah Owyang penned this article for Forbes magazine, as a guide for CMOs who are currently putting the finishing touches on their 2010 marketing strategies. Though most CMOs now recognise the need to put more resources behind social media, many more need some suggestions about how they might develop a solid strategy.  As such, Jeremiah assembled his thoughts under the following headings:

• Social marketing affects all digital marketing channels
• Customers don’t care what department you’re in
• Technology is cheap, yet soft costs are high
• Develop a pragmatic approach
• Social marketing affects the whole organisation

Read on for more detail.

Losing To The Social Web: Visualized
If you like visuals, then read on. This post from Unmissable blog looks at the decline of the ‘destination web’ (a topic we’ve covered here in the past) and suggests that the sun is setting on branded websites and microsites as social media swallows up a greater proportion of traffic on the web.

Unmissable has assembled graphs for some of the biggest brands on the web – Dell, Adidas, BMW, Quicksilver, Sony – and what you’ll immediately notice is “ websites and portals have been loosing unique visitors hand over fist for the last 3 years.”

This stands in sharp contrast to the graphs assembled for social networks, which show traffic rising ever higher over the same period.

Off-site content distribution like RSS, and the fact that social networks have become far more relevant to consumers are cited as the main reasons branded websites are suffering. The lesson here is that agencies and brands need to work out how better connect with customers online, and deliver relevant content and experiences where they are spending a growing proportion of their time online: in social media.

Measuring Engagement of the Social Web: ‘07-’09
An interesting post from the Postrank blog, which looked at various measures of ‘engagement’ since 2007 and identified a few trends worth paying attention to for content publishers. In sum:

• In absolute terms, more people are participating in the social web
• Conversations and discussions about the content are increasingly happening off the publisher’s property, fuelled by the growth of the “share and like this phenomenon which is sweeping through Facebook, Twitter and dozens of other social hubs”
• The widespread adoption of more pervasive communication tools like Facebook and Twitter is actually increasing the lifespan of a typical story, with engagement taking place over a longer period of time as the story gets passed around more widely

Twitter to launch paid-for corporate accounts this year
It been rumoured for some time and is perhaps one of the few ways in which Twitter could derive revenue, but at last Twitter has confirmed they are planning to launch ‘paid-for commercial accounts’, according to founder Biz Stone. Don’t panic though. What this actually means for brands and agencies who help them online is that Twitter will remain free for corporate and personal users, but would now offer companies additional paid-for services to help manage and analyse conversations online.

Bloggers strike back at Buscombe
Last week it was reported that Peta Buscombe, the chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, had ambitions to regulate bloggers. As one might imagine, it was not well received. Sunny Hundal, one-time winner of The Guardian’s blogger of the year award, has set out in detail why such regulation would be wholly incompatible with blogging practice. Read the letter in full.

Social networking sites criticised for failing to protect children

The head of a government body responsible for keeping children safe has criticised social networking sites for not doing enough to protect youngsters.

Whereas Bebo has recently introduced a “Ceop report” button for users to log abuse, no such mechanism currently exists on Facebook or Myspace. Here’s to hoping social networking sites follow Bebo’s lead in order to make the web a safer place for young people.

Other notable stories:

• Burberry attracts 200,000 to its social network
• Salesforce.com tries to bring social networking to the workplace
• STUDY: Most Fortune 100 Companies Don’t Get Twitter

Some of us weren’t lucky enough to get a chance to meet ‘la crème de la crème’ of social media at SXSW, but after my first day at the Marketing 2.0 Conference in Paris, I feel that I’ve had the chance to mingle with some of the top social media and marketing people. Shame the WiFi was non-existent once again at a French conference - I guess US folks must think WiFi hasn’t been invented yet in France!

But back to the conference, the impressive list of speakers and what this first day was all about. Much was said about the fact that people trust their peers more than they trust brands or advertising. Scott Monty at Ford, Alex Hunter at Virgin and Georges-Edouard Dias at L’Oreal all insisted on that notion and went into the details on what this meant for their company and the notion of ‘conversation’ was once again on everyone’s mind.  For Scott Monty at Ford, conversation is indeed what it all comes down to: social media is an opportunity to prove to individuals that you’re listening to them; it’s about building a relationship with people and humanising the company. For Charlie Schick, at Nokia,  the web is a conversation channel and brands must participate in conversations.

What’s interesting from our point of view at We Are Social is that the concept of conversation is clearly emerging – when Robin and Nathan set up We Are Social and established it as a ‘conversation agency’, it was in some way ‘groundbreaking’.  It now looks like the Forrester Connected Agency report’s predictions that ‘facilitating conversations for its clients will become the new role of an agency’ is now a reality, which is great for us as a business as more and more brands will understand the importance of being conversational. And clearly when Charlie Schick at Nokia explains that social media is the voice of a brand, this really reflects what we do for Skype: not only do we help them with strategic consultancy and social media monitoring, but we are also the voice of Skype: my colleague Peter is Skype’s blogger and he’s also @PeteratSkype on Twitter, managing their reputation online through conversation. Similarly, the This is Now campaign for the Ford Fiesta we’ve been working on for the last 6 months has all been about the conversations we’ve created.

But back to my favourite word for 2009: ROI… If social media is about building relationships with people and engaging in conversations in social media, how, as a brand, you measure your ROI? As an agency we have a fairly advanced approach, but I guess I was interested to hear about how these brands approached it. I very much like Scott Monty’s answer: ROI is very much a campaign-based approach vs. a long term commitment and an opportunity to build a relationship with people. And he went further and added “What’s the ROI of putting your pants on in the morning?”, along with a joke about how campaign-based ROI can be measured through HITS: How Idiots Track Success. Nevertheless, in real life, and especially in this period of recession, we know that ROI is important to clients but it’s great to see brands are taking a longer term interest with building relationship with people. Olivier Hascoat at MySpace insisted on that concept again: ‘stop campaigning and make a long term commitment’.

All in all, a very promising first day! As I’m publishing this, Day 2 has started and it’s already looking as exciting…

“Corporate communications have radically changed” says Andy Sernovitz, chief executive of the Blog Council, an organisation for heads of social media at big companies. “It’s no longer just companies talking to the press, and customer service talking to customers. All these other people showed up in the -middle. They may not be press and they may not be customers, but suddenly their collective voice is bigger than the traditional channels.”

The essence of social media is conversation. Rather than a one-way stream of information, where companies make announcements to the press and customers, social media enables a great deal of interaction, where companies are in constant dialogue with the public. “We’ve seen a shift from doing things the old way to now having conversations with our customers,” says Jeanette Gibson, director of new media for Cisco Systems.

The above comes from an article in today’s FT, about as mainstream a business publication as you can get, a sign that perhaps Europe is beginning to hear the siren call of the changes that social media is bringing to business. Again, Twitter is on the agenda:

Companies are using Twitter to douse public relations fires before they erupt. Scott Monty, head of social media for Ford Motors, used Twitter to appease users who were angry after the carmaker sued an enthusiast website that was selling unauthorised Ford merchandise. When fans of the enthusiast site posted angry messages, Mr Monty “tweeted back” to explain the company’s position.

Bonin Bough, who was appointed director of social media for PepsiCo last year, also used Twitter to defuse a brewing crisis after the company released a series of advertisements depicting a cartoon calorie character committing suicide.

We’d not disagree with this – in fact we’ve been pioneering this approach on behalf of Skype since last year (and Scott Monty is a friend of the family, so to speak), but the focus should be on the overall conversation, of which Twitter is yet just a small part – forums and blogs are likely to remain the most significant venues for some appreciable time (this will vary, of course, depending on the sector you’re in – for example, if you’re Sony BMG, MySpace won’t have lost its significance just yet).

However, Melissa Bounoua’s article in Forbes earlier in the week makes a valid point:

Most European companies haven’t even heard of Twitter, and some might think it’s a time waster. A spokeswoman for energy firm Total says that Chief Executive Christophe de Margerie has no idea what Twitter is. British Telecom says it doesn’t have a Twitter account and doesn’t plan to open one. Nestle’s communications manager says using Twitter “just never came up within the group strategy.” In general, experts say Europeans don’t latch on to new social networking technologies as quickly as Americans.

I’d swap ‘Europeans’ with ‘European companies’ – as far as the general population is concerned, Europe is ahead of the US – with a higher proportion of the UK population using social networking and Twitter than the US (and the rest of Europe broadly comparable) and all of Europe but Germany and Austria way ahead in terms of blog readership.

However, despite the FT’s urging, her analysis is sadly correct when it comes to European companies. We are here to help…