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A study of 1,089 official and unofficial law enforcement Twitter accounts shows about 21 percent don't tweet, nine percent tweet personal opinions about crime or criminal justice, and three percent have tweeted in a way that could be interpreted as racist or sexist.

Furthermore, the vast majority of agencies did not include legal disclaimers or refer to a social media policy on their Twitter accounts.

With the ability to reach billions of people for the price of a few keystrokes and clicks, the Web has become the way many of us make our first impressions. These days, I might know a person from their blog or Twitter account before I ever know them in real-life. If they made poor personal branding choices, perhaps I'll never want to actually meet them. Effectively constructing an online brand isn't easy, but thankfully one of the experts in the subject, Loïc Le Meur, founder of Seesmic and LeWeb, is launching his own video series to help set the foundation.

Since it launched late last year, social email marketing tool Flowtown has gained over 15,000 customers, most of which are small businesses, with its unique combination of email and social analytics.

The startup showed it might be onto something yesterday when it announced it raised $750,000 in seed funding from a group of well-known angel investors, including Mitch Kapor of the Lotus Development Corporation, Mark Goines of Mint.com, Dave McClure of 500 Startups, and others.

Earlier this week we provided a few tips for marketing your startup on the cheap, and a large part of that involves managing your brand's social media presence. Well that's all fine and dandy until you realize that there are dozens of social networks on the Web and actually managing them can be quite a daunting task for a small business on a budget. Enter Sprout Social, which does for social media what Zendesk does for support tickets, providing a rich Web-based dashboard for monitoring and management.

If the general trend toward crowdsourcing is any clue, then we are all well aware of the value of the Internet masses. Having access to a loyal fan base can be like a fount of free ideas and labor. From translating Wikipedia and Facebook to beta testing Google Chrome, crowdsourcing is used all across the Web for a number of purposes, and analyst firm Forrester is suggesting one more - co-creation.

According to a report released this week, U.S. consumers are willing "co-creators", a fact that many companies have yet to take advantage of.

The much-adored social media management platform HootSuite made clear how it intends to make money yesterday when it announced that the service is moving to a freemium model.

The company says that 95% of its current user base can likely continue to use the basic free account, but many small and medium-sized businesses and organizations will need to upgrade to one of four pro accounts ($5-100 per month) to continue using some of their favorite features like multiple team members and the ability to manage more than five social networks.

An upgrade rolled out to Wibiya today brings live chat to any website running the popular social toolbar.

The new chat widget connects to Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo or MySpace to bring real-time chat to customer's websites, which can be moderated from within the Wibiya dashboard. If somebody in a chat room starts busting out a bunch of racial epithets, for example, the site owner can remove the comments or ban the user all together.

I'm at the Techonomy conference today, where tech innovators from around the globe are gathered to discuss how technology can tackle the world's biggest problems. It's getting controversial already, and the day just began.

The day kicked off with a presentation about the future of the World Economic Forum's influential Global Information Technology Report, a 400-page annual study of the information and communication technology preparedness of every country in the world. Report co-author Soumitra Dutta said the rise of digital and social media calls us to consider social impacts, such as happiness and social cohesiveness, beyond mere GNP, and other factors like ecological sustainability require a reformation of the metrics in the report.   Discussion quickly illuminated, however, that such changes could get complicated - and controversial - if the organization goes beyond counting how many bits can be shot through the tubes in Tunisia or Tehran.

KickApps announced the new version of its enterprise social media management platform today. Previously, KickApps integrated its social features into existing CMS platforms, but now the company is attempting to replace other CMSs altogether.

KickApps provides a platform for not only publishing to various social media services, such as Facebook, but, by creating custom apps, it also allows enterprises to keep the data users generate on social media sites.

Online ticket-selling platform TicketLeap officially relaunched today, offering a more social media-heavy experience to users and continuing to provide free ticket sales to individuals, nonprofits and small businesses alike.

Integration with popular social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter is baked into the new platform rather thoroughly, beginning with the sign-up page, which allows users to connect with their Facebook account or sign up through TicketLeap. Upon entering their first event, users are encouraged to import events directly from Facebook and automatically publish their new event listing to Facebook.