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For any company that thought social media was a passing fad not worthy of their time, the numbers coming out of a recent study published by Opinion Research Corporation for Cone should come as a wake-up call. According to that study, 85% of Americans using social media think companies should have an active presence in the social media environment. What's even more interesting is that those users actually want the companies to interact with them while there.

Social media is evolving. What began as a way to "hang out" with friends online has morphed into an entirely new platform for communication, information sharing, and marketing. Businesses are quickly discovering that if they want to reach the youngest demographic, Generation Y (born after 1979), they had best get online. But maintaining a web presence alone isn't enough anymore. According to new research from August 2008, web retailers are now actually trying to engage that demographic segment using social media.

How An Unknown Artist's Work Became a Social Media Brand Thanks To the Power of Community

Twitter users are very familiar with the iconic image of the Fail Whale. This social object has been latched onto by Twitter fans not just as a representation of Twitter's downtime, but also as a representation of the community's love for the service and their hope for its triumph over their many struggles. Despite Twitter's troubles, most of its users stayed true, watching and waiting as the team began the long process of recoding the application in order for it to scale up. As Twitter succumbed to the strain of running their under-provisioned service, the Fail Whale "over capacity" image would appear. And this image began to take on a life of its own. This is the story of the Fail Whale.

Two months ago, Portland, Oregon-based Jama Software -- the makers of a web-based project management app called Contour -- began a program called "You try. We give." The idea was simple, for everyone who signed up for a free trial of Contour, the company would set aside some money to invest in microloans at Kiva. In theory, word of their philanthropy would help spread their product and more people would sign up to try it out, get hooked, and pay for the full version. Today, Jama made a bold decision: stop advertising on Google AdWords, and instead funnel the money from their advertising budget into Kiva.