Before you can start conversing with social media, you need to know what people are saying and how your organization or brand fits into that conversation. Here’s a quick guide to get you started on the very first step: listening.

Turns out the Japanese are blog-addicted, with the average blog visitor there spending more than one hour a month perusing others’ posts. It got us thinking about other interesting national social media consumption habits that just might tell us a bit more about these cultures.

Data-driven journalism is a big topic being taught at “J” (or, journalism) schools these days. What does this mean? Using data – charts, graphs or even explanatory text – to tell a complicated story in a few easily understood images. Here’s how it’s done.

Just when we were beginning to doubt the future of social networking, even suggesting Facebook fatigue was setting in, we get this dose of promising news: social network ad revenues is set to soar this year.

Facebook fatigue is hardly a new term. By our count, it first emerged over three years ago, back when Facebook had a user base in the tens of millions, when tech pundits wondered whether the social network’s monster growth run was stalling. While that proved to be far from true, today a new bit of research suggests there’s a worrying fall-off in activity from Facebook’s core audience: recent college grads.

Social media is radically reshaping how companies and organisations handle their crisis communications. At our recent #SMI11 conference, crisis communications experts Neil Chapman and Chris Reed offered a fascinating insight into the ways BP and Eurostar, among other companies, have learned from social media fallout.

Over the course of the next month we’ll be looking back at our #SMI11 conference with the help of some specially commissioned presentation maps prepared for us by Scarlet Design.

Mobile-mad Europeans have truly become a consumer force, new research shows, as smartphones have now become a major traffic driver to retailers’ sites. The research also showed accessing social networks on the go is another favorite activity of smartphone users. As researchers point out, this is both a big opportunity and a major threat for brands.

It may just be that the Newsfeed, and not the fanpage, is the most valuable real estate on Facebook for marketers. So says new research jointly produced by Facebook and comScore that shows Facebook users are 40-150 more times more likely to consume branded content in the Newsfeed than they are by going to the fanpage. And, thanks to the power of the Newsfeed there’s a new way to calculate your potential social media reach.

So says Publicis Modem UK in a forward-looking Slideshare presentation that covers what the new social network is about and what impact it will have on digital business. The more interesting question might be: will Google+ become a lynchpin of your business strategy?