Kistner notes that the decline of Web 2.0 and the rise of social media are connected. Since Facebook has hit the scene, the original social media tools have peaked in usage: blogs, wikis, forums and RSS.

Social media has been very popular for news outlets to cover (more so than Web 2.0 and new media ever were), and while has been quite disruptive to established media outlets, those that are embracing and even reinventing themselves are doing well (such as the NYTimes.com).

Facebook is the site receiving the most interest in the “explosion” of social media. It is so popular that no other search term in Google beats the number of searches for Facebook. The closest search term Kistner has found to rival the number of searches for Facebook is the word “the”!

Social media is showing dominance in traffic and usage in addition to monopolizing search attention. Compete.com is also showing Facebook as the mosted visited website, above Google and Yahoo.

Kistner concludes that social media is the innovation to invest in for businesses.

Please see socialfresh for all charts, graphs, and more information.

Companies with a social media communications plan tended to focus on these elements: resource-allocation guidelines for ongoing activities, registration of branded usernames on social sites and research into competitors’ use of social media, as reported on eMarketer.

There was a significant disparity between what respondents thought should be part of their company’s plan and what was actually part of that plan. 71% of respondents were concerned with preparing and distributing policies for ongoing communications, but only 45% of companies had such policies. Respondents were equally concerned with the ongoing monitoring of brand reputation, at 71%, but only 52% had a plan for such activities. More than two-thirds of respondents saw a need for departmental protocols detailing how social sites should be used by sales, human resources, customer service and other groups within the company, but only 29% reported distributing policies and/or communications protocols to employees.

A majority of companies with a social strategy included marketing (94%), PR (71%) and sales (55%) in their plans, with customer service (26%) and human resources (16%) lagging behind in use of social media. 71% of respondents agreed that the responsibility for creating social media strategies should fall to marketing departments.

Findings suggest that companies that have held back on adopting social media throughout their organizations would benefit from starting with a cohesive plan that involves all of the key groups within the organization (marketing, PR, sales, customer service, and human resources).

Besides improving customer relations, it also helps retain customers, according to Chelsea Marti (@TTaxChels on Twitter), TurboTax’ Social Media Manager, who explained the company’s approach at the TWTRCON NY conference.

TurboTax now has more than 20 million customers, but until this year, TurboTax wasn’t able to provide enough resources on Twitter to handle their queries. That changed in February, however, as it increased the number of employees staffing its Twitter feed to 40 from just two last year.  Had the feed been staffed only by communications and PR folks, it wouldn’t have succeeded given the complex queries it received. So the company employed tax experts to handle questions and the corporate communications team became the hub that farmed out questions to the appropriate folks to answer customers’ tax questions.

Marti said that at least half of the people who came to the feed were about to finish a return.  You can see the entire case study on Econsulstancy’s website.

While the company is proud to say it has served over 12 million users since its creation in 1998, it is more excited about the much smaller number of social media followers continuing to grow both on its corporate account (@DynInc) and its newly launched support account, the DynDNS Ninja Squad (@DynDNS). “Many companies get on social media sites such as Twitter and wonder why they don’t see a return. What we have learned is that if you give value you will get value. We talk a lot about transparency with everything we do and social media has been the best way to show our users that we really mean it,” said Kyle York, VP of Sales and Marketing at Dyn. “We have also differentiated ourselves by making contact with companies we follow and find valuable ourselves.”

For example, Dyn actually boasts @Twitter as one of their clients, reaching out to them along with @Zappos, @Hubspot and @SimpleGeoInc, simply because they share an appreciation for what they do.

Thousands of IBMers are the voice of the company. As it turns out, its decentralized social media approach is another milestone in the company’s history—driving unprecedented collaboration and innovation. IBM lets employees talk—to each other and the public—without intervention. With a culture as diverse and distributed as IBM’s, getting employees to collaborate and share makes good business sense.

IBM does have social media guidelines. The employee-created guidelines basically state that IBMers are individually responsible for what they create and prohibit releasing proprietary information. But the document lacks any mention of brand messages or values. Nor does IBM corporate regulate employee social media activity. Only three people hold social media roles at the corporate level, and oversight isn’t part of their jobs.

“We don’t police. The community’s largely self-regulating, and so there hasn’t really been a need to have someone go about and circuit these boards and blogs,” Christensen said. “Employees sort of do that themselves… And that’s worked wonderfully well.”

Ramon DeLeon, managing partner of seven Chicago-area Domino’s stores, saw the tweet and contacted the customer immediately. The correct pizza was already on its way. But DeLeon went way beyond, tweeting the customer the next day with a link to a video apology, followed by providing pizza for 350 people at the customer’s social club.

“The only way to put out a social media fire is with social media water,” DeLeon says. That’s why, when another Chicago customer tweeted happily about her Domino’s order, DeLeon sent her a video thank you from London, where he was speaking to a group of Domino’s franchise partners.

Learn about DeLeon’s wide use of social media to build his business in this case study at Social Media Examiner.

47% of respondents said they use Twitter for “brand monitoring,” 27% use the site for responding to customer service issues, 25% use it to gather customer feedback, and 23% use it for market intelligence. 34% of companies surveyed said they responded to negative tweets “systematically.” 62% of respondents as a channel for publicizing new content. Only 14% of respondents reported using Twitter as a sales channel, and 21% said they didn’t use it for any of the purposes listed above.  Article at MediaPost.

Make up your own mind after hearing McIntyre explain how those 48 hours worked. Were they too slow to react or rather just underestimated the power of social media?  McIntyre’s presentation is covered here by Deana Goodrich at Airfoil blog.

The Twitter handle ‘eurostar‘ turns out not to be related to the company, and the account it does own is called ‘little_break‘ because it is linked to its marketing campaign ‘Little break, big difference’.  Hiloariously, the account’s bio reads: “Official Eurostar Twitter feed. Not Eurostar customer service but trying to help get information out to our customers as received. Thanks for understanding.”

Eurostar sales and marketing director Emma Harris, it is worth noting, reacted to Eurostar having to run less than full service for five months after a September 2008 fire in the Channel Tunnel by suspending marketing–a decision she later acknowledged may not have been right with hindsight.

Read more details in this post at Brand Republic.

The video has been accused of having incestuous overtones and already generated consumer complaints to the car company, which stands by it as “funny and well made”.

Tim Burrowes, editor of Mumbrella,  offers a case study of Toyota’s disastrous foray into social media in Australia.  He says it offers a demonstration of what skills an agency needs to play in that space.  What was missing in this campaign, which led to a backlash against a TV ad deemed sexist, was PR expertise. Although advertising has always had the potential to be controversial, for social media that possibility grows exponentially and that risk needs to be controlled.

Burrowes says Saatchi & Saatchi demonstrated that you actually need to understand social media before you start. You can’t start learning on the client’s time.  Read his full commentary is at Mumbrella.