New insights into the utilization of social media by Fortune 100 companies reveals Twitter is still the hottest platform, but only US and Asian companies embrace the full scope of social media brand marketing, a new study compiled by Flowtown shows.

A recent comScore report suggests that brand loyalty declines in an economic recession. Obvious. Right? Well, looking at some interesting social media loyalty metrics, these findings might not be telling the whole story.

Polls open tomorrow for the UK general election but Facebook already has a beat on the winner after polling an impressive 463,000 eligible British voters on the popular social network this past weekend.
And the winner is…

Twitter is optimizing the way we search for tweets and, more importantly for its future, giving companies fresh opportunities to advertise within a Twitter conversation stream.

Are you friends with your mom on Facebook yet? We sure are. But is it cool? Not really.

Edison Research came out with their yearly report on Internet and multimedia usage in the US. The big news is the massive increase in Twitter-awareness, but tweeting participation remains low.

Millward Brown today released a new report ranking the world’s most valued brands. While the research agency mentions the importance of social media in future valuations (it’ll be big, they say), it bases its methodology on more traditional metrics. We thought it might be interesting to do a kind of mashup of the results, taking a look at how their top ten ranked if you added a measure of their social media presence.

At one point in mid-2008, we reported Brits were the world’s biggest online video junkies. A year-and-a-half later, and it’s clear that addiction continues to intensify, posing big challenges for TV programmers and big potential for advertisers.

This is the conclusion we can draw from two separate in-depth looks at Millennials, those teens and twenty-somethings that are coming of age amid a period of incredible innovation and incredible economic uncertainty.

Come earnings season, executives will turn to any rosy metric they can find in the financial statement to placate restless investors, particularly during an economic downturn like the one we’re in. All kinds of calculations …