Sometimes a video is worth 1,000 blog posts. This one does a great job explaining the immediate appeal and potential power of their social search. In personal tests, I didn't find it all that, but then neither was YouTube on day one. But the potential is screaming obvious. And I found it a glaring reminder of how far ahead of everyone Google is in search. Tried Facebook search lately?

Good reminder by the head of Dell's social media and community that social media is at the core of what successful small business operators have always done well. Develop great customer relationships.

Good information, if not that surprising. What did take me back was the number of accounts the 73 Twitter-active companies have set up. 540. That's an AVERAGE of over 7 accounts per company. And while the report overall has some good insights, and I think they're right on about companies just spouting off brand information and not really having a conversation, there are some aspects of the report that I think are skewing the data. Namely, they look at absolute Tweets and Followers, not relative figures based on a recent time period.

Interesting that this story and the NY Times story about apps integration on TV both rolled the same week. This is a big development towards social gaming, and could tie in very well to online gaming systems that aren't console based. They'll watch what happens here, and then roll it to their system.

It's a recurring theme. Large brand slashes costs and moves much of their marketing online. They build out their Facebook and Twitter pages, which have gathered a large following. This would imply more internalized campaign planning and operations handling. It's also interesting that this is happening to brands across the spectrum, and in fact, seems to be more prevalent with high-end brands as low-end.