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Seesmic and Yammer announced today a plugin that brings Yammer's enterprise microblogging and social networking tool to Seesmic's desktop social media application. In addition to making Yammer more appealing to companies that also use external social media, the integration helps Seesmic differentiate itself from other social media dashboards by offering more internal collaboration options.

Seesmic users can download the plugin from the marketplace section of the Seesmic Desktop app. The Seesmic Web client and various mobile clients do not yet have Yammer support.

Teenagers in the United States are constantly connected to the Internet. About 75% of them go online on a daily basis, and that number increases every year. Whether they're connected via their phones, gaming consoles, laptops or the computer lab at school, they're online pretty much all the time. Social networking - on Facebook and elsewhere - is a huge part of what they're doing.

You'd think this would be a potential boon for social media marketers, right? Not quite. According to research released today by Forrester, only 6% of U.S. consumers aged 12-17 are interested in interacting with brands on Facebook, even though they are active users of the site in general.

Last year Douglas Rushkoff took on the conventional wisdom of brand marketers at the Pivot conference. Earlier this year we posted his talk and it caused a good bit of debate about the nature of so-called "brand conversations" in social media, and the future of branding itself. This is an important topic as social CRM solutions begin to proliferate. According to Gartner, 4/10 of the businesses it polled are planning to roll-out social CRM initiatives within the next five years.

A presentation by branding agency Face takes a different view and advocates a synthesis of data-driven social media analytics and qualitative methods such as ethnography to make branding relevant in the social media age. The presentation quotes Mark Earls saying "Consumers' most valuable relationships are not with brands but with other consumers."

Facebook use is growing faster in Africa than on any other continent, and the Chinese are some of the most active social media users in the world.

The first fact comes from Socialbakers, a Facebook analytics company, which found that Africa gained more than 50% of its Facebook users in the last six months. The company also looks at other growing markets. The second comes from a Memeburn article by Thomas Crampton, which points out that although many Western social media services are blocked, the Chinese equivalents are extremely popular. And, according to Crampton, "A recent study by OgilvyOne in China found that 55 percent of China's netizens had initiated or participated in online discussions about companies."

The 83rd Academy Awards were broadcast this evening. The stories that will wrap up the evening's awards, fashion, and festivities are sure to focus on the winners, on the dresses, on the really really really badly scripted banter.

But for those of us tuning in via Twitter, I'd say the show was a great success. It provided plenty of material for running commentary, historical insights, quips and quibbles. For the funniest original writing, for example, I'd give a nod to Roseanne Cash for her #JaneAustinattheOscars tweets.

All the tweets, not just those from celebrities and insiders, were vastly more entertaining than the show itself, and the reason I'd wager that a whole new crowd of curious onlookers are tuning in. It's not about watching the Oscars per se. It's about being able to participate in the online community that's watching the Oscars. It's no longer sufficient to wait for the water cooler, to invoke a tried morning-after cliche. It's about checking-in and chatting with others and sharing the broadcast together.

When it comes to predicting the future, we don't need a crystal ball anymore. These days, we just need to look at how people act online - what they share with their friends on Facebook and Twitter - to predict things like box office success or the stock market.

With that in mind, we're here to see if some social media statistics and science can help us call some Oscar winners a couple days early.

Time and again, we're told that influence on Twitter isn't simply about the number of followers someone has. It's about a number of different factors, from retweets to reach to interaction, and more. Twitter influence analytics service Klout takes all of these factors and sums them up into a Klout score, which it says is "the measurement of your overall influence online."

Now, the company has released an extension for Google Chrome that brings its simple, one-number scoring metric directly to the Twitter.com interface.

Is your company's Website updated more than once a week? Is it integrated with social media tools like Facebook and Twitter?

These may seem like rather basic, obvious matters at this point, but a surprising number of small businesses are not updating their sites frequently or utilizing social media as much as they could be. The cost? Lots of traffic.

The Web is becoming social, and companies are jumping to capture the investment dollars. With business models and advertising effectiveness in question, it's hard to valuate such ventures. Social media economics does just that: it's the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of content amongst online social outlets.

It means treating social networks as if they are countries in the world economy. Each post is equivalent to a good or service, sharing is equivalent to trade or distribution, and clicks/views are the equivalent of someone purchasing or consuming the post.

Taking this logic, you can then apply the modern economic growth function: Y(f) = L, K, HC, T. Within that equation, Y is GDP or total economic output, L is labor, K is capital, HC is human capital, and T is technology. Together, these factors determine the worth of an economy.

While some countries aim to stop revolution by cutting off access to services like Twitter and Facebook, others try to turn social media use on its ear and use these services to monitor its population. Late last month, the Egypt erupted in revolution and the government quickly shut off all social media, before shutting down the Internet entirely. China has taken a similar stance, banning sites like Twitter and Facebook for long periods of time, as an attempt to prevent protests, among other things.

The U.K., on the other hand, has taken this opposite route. According to a story in The Associated Press today, police in the U.K. will use social media sites to keep track of protestors and respond accordingly.