It's hard to know where to spend most of our limited time with social media. It's worthwhile to dive deep enough to consider the gateway questions that will help you make the decision to dive deeper or not.

The Universal McCann Wave 5 study is out, identifying trends and key data points on internet use by active internet users worldwide. The key takeaways are the socialization of brands, the rise of branded communities, the continued rise of microblogging, and the results of joining a branded online community.

Now that your Place is claimed, what are the capabilities of Places and its potential uses? Most importantly, how does that functionality open up possibilities? This post explores six ways that Places offers opportunities for you to interact on Places with your fans - and brainstorms a few possibilities.

Estrella Rosenberg, founder of Big Love Little Hearts, came up with the idea for the #100x100 Foursquare campaign nine days before the launch. This is the story of how she promoted awareness of CHD through Foursquare, leveraged $25,000 in the meantime, and laid the groundwork for lasting legislative change.

In an international survey of social network users, InSites Consulting found that social network users trust brands' social sites for information about the brand itself, second to peer information. Is this astonishing? In the article, I also think about how nonprofits can utilize this information for their brands.

Two data sets, two different user groups, same results: Small businesses and nonprofit find social media effective for reaching new customers and strengthening existing relationships. Irrefutable evidence of the power of engagement.

Active management of an online community on a registered site or social network translates into quantifiable value for the sponsoring organization. This blog post offers value data from two online communities that lost active community managers, and the subsequent effects on both the community and value from the community to the sponsoring organization.

This post asks: Should Dunbar's number inform the way organizations act online? If fans have a finite number of engaging relationships online, is it possible for a fan to have a real relationship with an organization online? This post explores the tension between scale and intimacy, individual and organizational relationships.

Why don't organizations create meaningful, strategic taglines? A tagline represents the mission of the organization, distilled into less than eight carefully chosen words. Company taglines, and professional taglines, should move the mission forward in all social media updates, and make networking more strategic and informative.

A new study by ROI Research revealing reasons why people most often unsubscribe from email lists, and the rates at which they unsubscribe. You can't listen and engage in an email blast, but you can take the information from listening and engaging on social networks, and use that to decrease your unsubscribe rates.