Last week I was asked to deliver a presentation on social SEO and what Google’s search formula tweaks now mean for brands and organizations looking to boost their visibility. This is a rapidly evolving issue, but there are some enduring points here that all organizations (and journalists too!) should keep in mind. Hopefully this guide will help you.

I’ve been exploring some of the implications of openness at large scale and identifying how value is created. One way to think about that is by positioning openness and empowerment against control and ownership.

We’re actually being slightly conservative here, given the new data from comScore. Incredibly, Facebook served up about one in every three online display ads served in the U.S. And that was just for Q1, a seasonally slow quarter.

What’s hot in social media investment this week? Social commerce, crowdsourced content hubs, apps specialists and, yes, social media monitoring. This week’s freshly funded startups brought in a combined $409.9 million, thanks mainly to SocialLiving’s massive $400 million haul.

Topsy provides a real-time search engine for social networking sites with particular focus on Twitter. It works through content and relevancy keywords, then it rates the discussion based on the influence and reach of the participating users. This, the company proclaims, is the forefront of Search 2.0.

What does it take to build a fully-functional social network from scratch? Users, and lots of them. But how do you convince the public that this new network is worth their time? For askalo, the new location-based Q&A network, the key is to hit the social niche with a game-based pitch. And, to go hyper-local.

Facebook is the first to say its new communications platform, Facebook Messages, is not email, nor is it some kind of “email killer.” Maybe not. Still, the web’s biggest email providers, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL, should be quaking today.

In today’s “you win some/lose some” category we have, yep, Facebook. We reported earlier about Facebook’s troubles in Japan as it is Twitter who is challenging the local incumbent there for top spot among social networks. But fear not. In the all important metric of “making money,” Facebook is doing just fine, padding its lead as America’s largest online display ad publisher.

Facebook has soared past Yahoo as the Number 2 place to watch online videos. More great news for the dominant social network? Well, maybe not: people still spend more time watching videos on Yahoo, and there are nagging doubts about how Facebook can actually make money from video content.

Social is beating search in the battle for our web time, with new comScore research showing Facebook topping Google in terms of time spent on the site. This isn’t too surprising, as people tend to linger on their Facebook profiles and only briefly use Google to go elsewhere. Nevertheless, this is yet another signal of the shift of web dominance.