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The social net­work Face­book admits that it uses file trac­ers, even for peo­ple who are dis­con­nected from their plat­forms, and will not change their habits.

With the help of Face­book engi­neer Arturo Bejar, an arti­cle enti­tled “Face­book track­ing is under scrutiny” on the USA Today web­site reveals details of how mem­bers are tracked on the social net­work, whether con­nected or not, and how their stored data is used. Vis­i­tors who do not have accounts on Face­book are also involved. The social net­work uses track­ing codes, also known as cook­ies, which are placed on the user’s com­puter dur­ing a web­site visit. Wide­spread, they are use­ful to sites and online ser­vices to see if a user is logged-in, or if they have already vis­ited the web­site. A good exam­ple being when you shop on Ama­zon, the prod­ucts you were shop­ping for last week are star­ing you straight in the face this week.

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“The cus­tomer is in charge. If you think you own your brand, you’re wrong – the cus­tomer does. In fact, for­get brand­ing. No one buys that stuff anymore.”

Sound famil­iar?

Cer­tainly, if you read many of today’s mar­ket­ing blogs, you’ll be left with the impres­sion that these days there’s vir­tu­ally noth­ing you can do to cre­ate, improve or sus­tain a com­pelling brand. The growth of social media and other peer-to-peer com­mu­ni­ca­tions has meant that cus­tomers don’t need to lis­ten to com­pa­nies to get their infor­ma­tion any more. They are more than happy to form their own opin­ions thank you very much. As the Clue­train Man­i­festo says:

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We held another suc­cess­ful Hud­dle over at the Ban­ner offices yes­ter­day. The sub­ject was all things mobile. And, over the course of the next few blog posts, I’ll be tak­ing you through some of the insights from the var­i­ous speak­ers who gen­er­ously gave their time to make the after­noon such a suc­cess:

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• Simon Sil­vester – EVP Head of Plan­ning, Y&R EMEA
• Christina Carstensen – Direc­tor of Mobile Strat­egy, IDG
• Matt Findel-Hawkins – Sales Direc­tor, Nikkei BP Europe
• Mark Challi­nor – Direc­tor of Mobile, Tele­graph Media Group

This week saw the launch of Google’s lat­est devel­op­ment to lever­age the social graph for their search results. While the com­pany has used social cues from Twit­ter and Flickr for more than a year to improve organic rank­ings, they are now cre­at­ing their own rec­om­men­da­tion func­tion and extend­ing it to both paid search and organic search.

The fea­ture is sim­ply called “plus one”. If you’re famil­iar with Face­book adverts and likes, the con­cept is not very dif­fer­ent. When users are logged into Google, they will be able to rate indi­vid­ual search results and adverts by click­ing the “plus one” sym­bol. Their friends will then see the endorse­ment.

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Dur­ing a meal with a client the other day, she men­tioned that a divi­sion in her com­pany was deploy­ing a task force to develop a social media strat­egy. Whilst I under­stood the sen­ti­ment, I explained that this seemed like the wrong thing to do. I was obvi­ously accused of heresy and ignor­ing the most impor­tant trans­for­ma­tion in mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions since Johannes Guten­burg devel­oped the print­ing press in 15th Cen­tury. After all, which self-respecting com­pany doesn’t have a fully defined social media strat­egy?

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They say the busier you are, the less you get done! Novem­ber has proved to be a busy month with loads of announce­ments from the likes of Sam­sung, Apple, Face­book, Sony, Google… the list goes on. This week’s DC is all about pro­duc­tiv­ity (at work and home), so don your specs, and read on.

F-mail

First a Hol­ly­wood block­buster, then the world! Face­book has stepped up to chal­lenge Google and Yahoo with it’s ‘not an email client’ email client. Face­book is giv­ing its 0.5 bil­lion users an ‘@facebook.com’ not-an-email-address address, and launched a sin­gle por­tal for SMS-ing, tweet­ing and email­ing through the Face­book frame­work.

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The final pre­sen­ta­tion at last week’s Social Media Hud­dle was from Xabier Ormaz­a­bal. He’s Senior Man­ager, Prod­uct Mar­ket­ing over at Salesforce.com. His 25 minute slot was filled with a huge amount of insight and action­able advice. Here’s a quick sum­mary of the points I took from it.

Salesforce.com build their social media strat­egy around three pil­lars of online com­mu­nity. Seems like a pretty straight for­ward model:

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• First ensure that your cor­po­rate site and other owned web prop­er­ties are work­ing hard for you. Focus on build­ing engage­ment through knowl­edge shar­ing, user groups, blogs and ideas sharing.

This post con­cen­trates on Ioanna Stagia’s pre­sen­ta­tion at our Social Media Hud­dle. She’s Research Direc­tor over at CNN International.

CNN have cer­tainly pushed the bound­aries when it comes to explor­ing the power of rec­om­men­da­tion and the value of shared con­tent. Their global research ini­tia­tive Pow­nar, illus­trates why peo­ple share con­tent, how they share it and the type of con­tent they pre­fer to share. In the US and Europe, peo­ple tend to share con­tent for altru­is­tic rea­sons, whereas in Asia, shar­ing con­tent is more about broad­cast­ing your sta­tus. As you might sus­pect, arti­cles with embed­ded video and images are most likely to be shared. And, Face­book is the pri­mary plat­form used for shar­ing.

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LinkedIn is an unde­ni­able force when it comes to B2B social net­works. Henry Clifford-Jones showed us some fas­ci­nat­ing sta­tis­tics – over 80 mil­lion pro­fes­sion­als view­ing 1.5billion pages per month across 600,000 pro­fes­sional groups.

When you want to build a group on LinkedIn, it’s only going to be a suc­cess if you build it around a com­mon inter­est and pur­pose. An empty LinkedIn group can be a very lonely place…

So, the more focused and well-defined the group is, the higher the level of par­tic­i­pa­tion and engage­ment. Also, don’t get too dis­ap­pointed if most peo­ple aren’t con­tribut­ing. LinkedIn reckon that for every per­son that con­tributes on the site, nine will com­ment and inter­act, whilst 90 will just sit back and con­sume the con­tent.

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The impend­ing Tube Strike didn’t deter a record num­ber of tech­nol­ogy mar­keters com­ing to the Ban­ner offices to take part in this year’s Social Media Hud­dle. And, look­ing at the feed­back, the con­tent of the day was rated at 4.2 out of 5.

So first of all, a big thank you to our speak­ers and work­shop mod­er­a­tor for mak­ing the hud­dle such a suc­cess and pre­sent­ing such com­pelling con­tent — Ioanna Sta­gia (CNN Inter­na­tional), Henry Clifford-Jones (LinkedIn Europe), Jackie Hewitt (Autodesk), Xabier Ormaz­a­bal (Salesforce.com) and Zoe Sands (Juniper).

There were a num­ber of com­mon strands to the day:

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