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Douglas Rushkoff spoke at Pivot, a conference on branding, last year and recently linked to a video of his talk. It's worth watching if you're involved in social CRM or any other sort of social business.

For the first approximately 20 minutes of the talk, Rushkoff rants about the corporatization of the Internet and summarizes his book Life Inc. He explains the origins of the modern corporation during the mercantilist period of European economic development, and how branding came about as a means to put a friendly face on mass production. But during the final 10 minutes, Rushkoff gives some practical advice to companies trying to make sense of the social Web.

Keeping up with every RSS feed item and tweet is hard enough for anybody, let alone someone trying to run a business. That's why each week, ReadWriteBiz rounds up the most important tech news and insights for small and medium-sized businesses.

LinkedIn hinted at its own vision of the future of business cards with its acquisition of CardMunch, an iPhone app that digitizes paper business cards by scanning them. The application, which previously charged users based on usage, was made freely available by its new owners.

Anybody who wrangles analytics data for a living knows what a pain it can be to get a handle on social media metrics. Different sources offer different metrics in different formats, and even Twitter's official real-time analytics dashboard is not yet publicly available.

Export.ly is a new Web app that aims to ease some of that pain by giving social marketers the means to export data from Twitter, Facebook and email into a Excel spreadsheet or CSV file.

In its own words, Buddy Media offers "power tools for Facebook." Its service is, in essence, a content management system for Facebook geared towards the needs of large organizations. For example, Starwood Hotels uses Buddy Media to manage Facebook pages for its hotel chains. Each individual hotel can have its own Facebook page, and all the pages for the brand can be centrally managed.

Other companies using Buddy media in ABC, Johnson & Johnson and Target. According to Joe Ciarallo, director of communications at Buddy Media,seven of the 10 biggest brands in terms of advertising spending are Buddy Media clients. Last week, it won the Crunchie for best enterprise startup of the 2011.

Pope Benedict XVI delivered a message on social media and online communications today, telling Catholic Internet users to be respectful of others online and to not focus too much on their online popularity. The message was part of the church's annual World Day of Social Communications.

During his speech last year, Benedict had urged church leaders to embrace digital tools in order to communicate their message to laypeople. This year's message calls for those online to adopt a "Christian style presence" and to be "respectful and sensitive."

After a few years of buzz in mobile marketing circles, QR - or "quick response" - codes are finally starting to pop up in the United States, thanks in large part to the proliferation of smart phones.

While they're still not exactly mainstream, QR codes are appearing in major print publications and plastered on storefronts and buildings. At this rate, it won't be long before most people can immediately recognize and use QR codes. So how can small businesses take advantage of this emerging technology?

Wall placards, museum docents and audio tours have all become essential technologies for many peoples' engagement with our collective culture as represented in the world's fine art.

Imagine what could happen if your enjoyment of art was augmented further by the kinds of social technologies that you already use on the internet. Thousands of visitors to the STRP art festival in Eindhoven, Holland this Fall got to experience exactly that. The festival's creative integration of its existing art exhibits with Twitter, Facebook, a recommendation engine, a print-on-demand service, tag clouds and RFID chips might represent the kind of experience that art lovers everywhere may be able to enjoy elsewhere soon. If life imitates art, such technologies could bust out of the museums and enter into the rest of our cities sooner than we think.

This week on ReadWriteBiz, we're running down our list of recommended New Year's resolutions for small and medium-sized businesses. Today we talk about how to better allocate scarce resources to build a more effective social media strategy in 2001.

Social media has exploded over the last few years and as 2010 comes to a close, you should now have enough data handy to help you determine what's working and what isn't. Sure, everybody was freaking out about Twitter this year, and you jumped on that bandwagon, but is it paying off? If a particular social media tool isn't helping your business grow, now is a good time to either ramp up your efforts or cut it off and focus those meager resources elsewhere.

With more than 550 million people on Facebook, 65 million tweets posted on Twitter each day, and 2 billion video views each day on YouTube—, social media has become an integral part of our connected lives. But this is just the beginning.

For the past two years, I have been forecasting the evolution social media will undergo. Key trends for 2010 included social media integration across applications and devices, lowered technological barriers, mobile pervasiveness and social media ROI as a focus. It is safe to say that these trends indeed became reality and I expect these to continue and materialize in new solutions, applications and case studies in the year ahead.

The total volume of spam hitting our collective inboxes continues to decline. According to the latest data from Symantec, the global spam volume in October declined by 22% month-over-month and over 47% since August. This reduction can be attributed to the shutdown of major spam networks like spamit.com and the Bredolab botnet. Even with this decline, though, spam still made up 86.6% of all emails in October. This is the lowest number Symantec has reported since September 2009.