ReadWriteWeb

Last night's Grammy awards was not the Super Bowl, which broke a tweets-per-second record, but it was still a chance for advertisers to tap into an audience watching the event on television and using second screens to discuss the event on social media.

But, much as they did last week, most brands scored a big swing-and-a-miss: big, because Twitter was already super-charged with Saturday night's death of Whitney Houston, meaning some people who had no plans to watch the broadcast were tuning in after reading tweets about the 48-year-old singer.

Today Google+ finally released Google+ Brand pages to all, and ReadWriteWeb immediately went out and claimed one for our very own. But in our team chat room and on each other's Google+ accounts, we've debated what we should do with it.

We asked and culled your responses from Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and we used Storify to present it all back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

Facebook allows users of its social networking site to comment on its pages without Liking them now.

This is a step in a direction that might make advertisers, brand managers and marketing people feel a little uneasy, because it means they may have to start thinking deeply for their brand rather than just counting hits.

Today, Foursquare launched a new version of Pages. The update allows anyone to sign up for a brand page that can push tips and check-ins to followers on Foursquare, as well as to Facebook and Twitter. Foursquare lets users add new locations to the service, but, until today, there was no good way for most places to actively reach out to users, unless their owners waded through a daunting application process for a brand page.

As we have mentioned previously, the success of augmented reality depends partly on its exposure through major mainstream brands. Late last week, the Ben & Jerry's ice cream empire took its first steps into the world of AR by adding the functionality to its iPhone app - but not in the way you might immediately assume. Today, I had the opportunity to chat with Katie O'Brien from Ben & Jerry's about the app and how a large brand approaches unique and niche emerging technologies.

These days, everyone is talking about social media and discussing what services and tools to use, how to use them, why you should use them, etc. In fact, if you listened to all the advice out there, you would probably think that no matter who you are, whether an individual wanting to build a personal brand, or a large multinational corporation intent on communicating with customers, you should be using social media. But is social media for everyone? Are there times when you shouldn't be using it at all?

Interbrand recently released its 2009 list of the best 100 global brands. Social media monitoring and analytics firm Sysomos took a closer look at this data today. While Interbrand bases its list on criteria such as financial data, international scope and economic value added, Sysomos decided to re-evaluate the top 20 brands by their social media presence on blogs, forums and news sites. Sysomos did not include mentions on Twitter in this study. This obviously led to major changes to Interbrand's list. Google, which placed only 7th on the Top 100 Brands list, ranks 1st when it comes to social media mentions in 2009, while Coca-Cola, the #1 brand on the Interbrand list, ranks only 11th on Sysomos' list.

Researchers at Pennsylvania State University recently revealed the results of a study which looked into how people were using Twitter to talk about products. Companies, of course, fear what a negative barrage of tweets can do to their brand, leading many to establish Twitter accounts themselves to provide information, customer service, and support. As it turns out, these businesses may not need to worry too much about what the "Twitter effect" can do to their image after all. The study revealed that the number of brand-related tweets where sentiment is expressed is not the dominating force that you may think. In fact, the majority of tweets mentioning a brand are merely casual comments or tweets from someone giving or seeking information. And when sentiment is expressed, it's generally positive.

A new study released by enterprise wiki provider Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group shows that the brands most engaged in social media are also experiencing higher financial success rates than those of their non-engaged peers. To determine this relationship, the study focused on 100 companies from the 2008 BusinessWeek/Interbrand Best Global Brands survey and the various social media platforms they used like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, wikis, and forums. Although it's difficult to prove for certain that the companies' involvement in social media has led to their increased revenues, the implication behind the new data is that it has.

According to the latest data from Hitwise about Twitter users in the UK, Twitter has become an important source of traffic for entertainment sites, other social networks, and news and media sites, but compared to other social networks, Twitter only sends a small amount of traffic to online retailers. Hitwise's Robin Goad also points out that Twitter is now the 30th biggest source of traffic in the UK and accounts for 1 out of every 350 visits to a typical web site in the UK.