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We have talked about the power of utilizing social networks for businesses before in our Weekend Reading series with books like The Facebook Era, by Clara Shih and Crush It!, by Gary Vaynerchuk, and this week we've got another book under a similar vein. Published just last month, Social Networking for Businesses: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs, by Rawn Shah is a guide for companies looking to take advantage of the collaborative communities of social networks to improve their business.

A few weeks ago we brought you a brief list of social networks for meeting and conversing with entrepreneurs, and in the comments section we received lots of suggestions that could have made the list as well. One such suggestion was Sprouter, which is, for lack of a better description and despite having a few unique features, a Twitter clone for entrepreneurs.

We've been on a "leveraging social media to boost your brand" trend lately with our Weekend Reading series here at ReadWriteStart; we previously brought you Gary Vaynerchuk's Crush It! and just last week we covered Butow and Bollwitt's Blogging to Drive Business. This week we continue this trend and additionally narrow our focus to social networking with the latest book from author Clara Shih, The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff.

It's often said these days that Google and Facebook are major rivals, but how could that be if one is in search and the other, social networking? Traffic analyst firm Hitwise provided one very clear clue tonight when it published new numbers for web user activity in Australia. For perhaps the first time ever, social networking sites have surpassed the traffic search engines receive, Hitwise says. There is reason to question the company's categorization of web traffic, but the trend is worth examining none the less.

Social networking climbed fast this year, and Hitwise says it just peaked over search for a few days during the communication frenzy of Christmas. Take that, Larry and Sergey - Mark and Ev are right behind you.

When we first looked at Spredfast, the social campaign management tool launched today by Austin, Texas-based Social Agency, we thought it looked like a less-flashy version of TweetDeck. Our first question to co-founders Kenneth Cho and Scott McCaskill was actually how the two programs differed and they took it in stride, given how far off the question really was. With big names like IBM, AOL, Cisco, Intel and Porter Novelli using the service, you better bet it does more than manage a handful of social networking accounts and microblogging services.

Spredfast wants to be a new player in the field of social campaign management, and it is set to compete with other big names like Objective Marketer and Radian6.

A third of all Internet users in the U.S. now post status updates on social networking services like Twitter and Facebook at least once per week. According to new data from Forrester Research, more than half of what the report calls "conversationalists" are female and 70% are 30 years old or older. Forrester's data also shows that 59% of all U.S. Internet users now use social networks and that 70% consume content on social media and social networking sites.

Although most of your friends may not be jumping at the opportunity to share their online connections with the likes of the U.S. Census Bureau or the local chamber of commerce, local, state and federal agencies alike have joined the ranks of parents, grandparents and others new to the social networking scene. That's right, the U.S. government is joining Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and any number of other social networking sites in droves and they want to be your friend.

And here we thought grandpa joining Facebook was really the death of its coolness.

According to a new study, enterprises continue to deploy social networking tools at an increasing pace. At the same time, though, this Cisco-sponsored study also found that a surprisingly small number of businesses have implemented formal processes and policies related to their use of social media. IT departments have also been left out of the loop when it comes to the adoption of social media tools. Only 10% of the respondents currently involve their IT departments as primary decision makers when it comes to choosing technologies for externally facing social networking initiatives.

One of the first social networking aggregators to take advantage of LinkedIn's brand-new API is Sobees, whose two client applications both now offer LinkedIn integration in addition to the other supported networks. A challenger to similar services like TweetDeck, Seesmic, and PeopleBrowser, Sobees is a social networking aggregation tool originally launched as a desktop app back in 2008 with a web app version added earlier this year. Like its competitors, Sobees' clients use a columnar interface to display real-time updates from sites like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace.

Today at the DEMOfall 09 conference, Digitrad announced a new consumer voice service called OrganIP. Although the odd name conjures up ideas of a medical or musical application, we think that perhaps it's supposed to be a play on the word "organize." (Well...maybe.) Names aside, what this new application does is intriguing. It connects you with your social networking friends via your mobile phone or web browser, allowing you to place calls even if you don't know your friend's phone number. In addition, you can use the app to send voicemails or even voice-to-text messages and all you need to know is a person's name.