Although the “thud” wasn’t verified until this afternoon, it seems that an online giant fell a couple of days ago. According to new data from Hitwise, Facebook managed to beat Google in terms of visits between March 7th and March 13th, becoming the most visited website in the U.S. for the week.

Do you see Facebook consistently beating Google as the most-visited site? Comments welcome.

The graph visible below makes the changeup pretty clear (blame the sloppy enlarged bit on us, not Hitwise). What’s more, it doesn’t look like Facebook’s going to relinquish its lead anytime soon.

Heather Dougherty explained, “The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame.”

Then here’s one more interesting fact, courtesy of Dougherty: “Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week.”

Anyway, this development represents a major win for Facebook. The ability to represent the social network as the number one site should count for a lot as corporate representatives talk to advertisers and investors, and could result in a direct boost in revenue. A further snowball effect in terms of user interest might occur, too, since most people like to be part of something that’s popular.

But shouldn’t we also look at all the new sites coming up fast – and not forget established ‘older’ ones? eBay for example or Twitter being two of them. Service websites like Pix2Press will undoubtedly grow over the next years to come and revolutionize the way how photo or video media is distributed to newspapers, magazines or TV. If sites like Pix2Press combine their powers with social networking sites, we have Millions of photographers feeding the world-wide media. Back this up with Twitter – there is no place to hide for any celebrity.

Comments welcome.

The social media movement has expanded the number of people we can reach and connect with on a personal level. The new relationships and connections we create with people all over the world can have a profound effect on our personal and business growth. We learn about cultures and nations that we were, perhaps, previously ignorant of. None of this is a new concept, but what may be is how quickly you can destroy your business by using social media incorrectly.

Transparency is a Utopian Concept

Not too long ago, Michael Fortin wrote an article titled Don’t Be Transparent, Be Authentic Instead. That article is an important read for any social media wrangling business blogger and you can search for it online.

That article is the tip of the iceberg in the concept of ‘transparency’ being too Utopian to work within the jaded confines of our society. Of course, true transparency is ideal. Many things about a perfect world are. Unfortunately, as a group, most of the world isn’t ready or willing to accept true transparency without penalty.

When Transparency Fails

Let me give you a couple of examples of transparency failure we’ve seen.

Failure 1: We had a copywriter who was posting on Twitter about the work he was doing. He made several posts within a few hours which were ugly complaints about a client and how ’stupid’ he felt that client was. We obviously considered this unacceptable and immediately removed him from our list of subcontractors, but think about this: If he was hoping to use Twitter to get more client work – how many potential clients just read that and thought… “I’m not going to risk being badmouthed on here, I’ll find someone else.” Everybody gets frustrated, but what if the client he was working on read that? Put it this way, if you wouldn’t say it to your client directly – don’t post it either.

Failure 2: We had a designer who was a day late returning her design phase work. When we contacted her, she said she had a family emergency the night before and was unable to send in her work because she wasn’t home. A quick check on Facebook showed that she was actually out at a party that night and posted multiple times while drunk talking about how much she was drinking and even hinting at wanting to bring a man she met there home with her. Obviously, we relieved her of the design work, handed it to another designer who caught up on the time schedule, and didn’t again work with her. In this case, people are allowed to have a life, we understand that. But if you cannot get your work done and have to lie about why – it’s a problem. If you do not have enough class to not post details about your ‘wild nights’ to everybody on your social networks — that’s also a problem.

How We Monitor Social Media Conversations

My business has been around for over a decade and is very focused on client satisfaction and excellent treatment of our web design clients. We have a network of hundreds of copywriters, designers, and coders who work with us on projects. However, even with screening of those experts when they come on board with us – you don’t always know someone until you have observed them over a long period of time.

That’s why we monitor what they say online.

How do we do that? Well first we get as many of their social profiles as we can. Usually, we ask for a list of them. We’ve also found that most people won’t provide them all. We then Google search the usernames of the ones they have given us because most people use the same usernames over and over. We also monitor blogs, and check for listings of social networks on those.

We have a system set up to consolidate all their social media comments into one master feed. That master feed can then be browsed directly to see what they’re up to, but that’s a lot of things to read each day. What we do is take the master feed, run it through a filter that creates two sub-feeds based on certain things we think are important to monitor. The first sub-feed is created by running the master list through a keyword & synonym filter that pulls out words related to business – for instance, “client” “business” “work” etc… The second sub-feed has a filter that runs their posts through a check for foul language and words like “sex” “drugs” “drunk” etc… There are hundreds of words in each filter.

Seem a bit ‘big brother’? It probably is – but reputation and client treatment is very important to us.

Here’s the thing: If we can read it and you can lose work with us over it… how many POTENTIAL clients did you lose also?

Food for thought? Get updates from @why_tweat

Social media is more than just a trend for brands, although agencies often have to make it up as they go along. One of the most charming successful ideas was presented by VCCP, which used social media in a campaign to create an own world around the meerkat Aleksandr, who has 28,000 twitter followers and over 600,000 Facebook friends. The most

In the age of social media, the noise level increased. Brands can fail to communicate, vanish or produce an outcry which can affect their business badly. In short: social media are a challenge for brands, and they have to be taken into account.

While there are some good examples, a lot of companies still don’t understand the impact of the new media. Before, brands tended to control their image. They directed the communication. With social media, this time is over. The brand of today faces much more interaction. Depending which way you look at it, social media either forces or enables brands to develop new ways of communication with their customers.

“It is a real opportunity to move a brand into this new scary world,” said Will McInnes, the managing director of social media agency NixonMcInnes. “The nature of a firm and its organisation is changing at the moment. Brands are starting to get their head around the fact that they have lost the control of their personality. We have to deal with a world where all our employees have a voice which is influencing the brand.”

“Companies are used to do everything behind a wall, but these times are over. Openness and transparency are hallmarks in a digital age,” said Candace Kuss, the director of planning at Hill & Knowlton. “Customer service, for example, is definitely public today. Especially service brands need to respond quick to the new opportunity – and it is not just Twitter. ”

As several creative consultants reported, the common trend among brands was last year to ask for an iPhone application, while this year the hot new thing is the social media engagement. It was Richard Baker, the twittering general manager of Liverpool & North Wales Coast, Virgin Trains, who reminded everyone that social media is not a jack-of-all-trades device: “I don’t think every customer cares if you have a personality as a brand. Some customers just want information.”

The social media engagement of brands now seems to be being taken more seriously and therefore integrated in companies’ media planning. Up until now, it has been driven by the interest of certain individuals such as Richard Baker or Scott Monty for Ford. Both interacted with their companies’ customers on their own behalf. They listened, long before their brand got an official Twitter account.

Indeed, listening was one of the pieces of advice that was most often repeated throughout the conference. The other standard quotation was that no one knows where social media are going. Drew Benvie, the managing director of 33 Digital, reported that most companies are working on communication guidelines, but usually it is just common sense.

So an important “Do” for companies today is to sound human and act transparent. That means trusting employees, as highlighted by James Hart, the ecommerce director of Asos who asked his staff to add the brand name to their user name. And for employees that means balancing the corporate with the personal. Meanwhile, the “Don’ts” are rather clear: Don’t lie, don’t pretend, don’t be rude.

Several experts emphasised on the panel “Who’s your brand?”, that customers expect a long-term relationship, while more and more companies are heading towards the “Hollywood model”, as Will McInnes later called it, with specialists assembling around a project for a while and then moving on to the next project. Companies should be open about such changes, he said.

intense professional use of social media is surely Red Bull. And that there is potentially money in social media, was demonstrated by Glam Media’s new invention Tinker.com, which can report an interaction rate of 17%, while the industry average is 2,7%.

Stay tuned @why_tweat