If you want to experience a petri dish of thousands of educated, media savvy professionals and content producers actively using social technologies as part of their daily life, come to Austin, Texas for South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi). This is the festival that essentially launched Twitter in 2007 and Foursquare in 2009, and the expectations are always high for what will break out here.

Since it's almost three days later, maybe this qualifies as an irrelevant question to ask -- but are there any companies out there more clueless than Disney/ABC and Cablevision?

What would a brand need to give you to become a fan of their page on Facebook? A free hamburger? A pair of underwear? Virtual cash to support your virtual farm? These are all real examples. T.G.I. Friday's gave out the burgers in September 2009. And just last week, Microsoft ponied up (pun intended) 3 Farm Cash, the virtual currency of Facebook's leading application FarmVille, to players who became a fan of Bing.

True-confessions time: I used to be a PR person -- back when it was a very different profession. And social media is changing public relations still further from what I used to consider "doing PR." Today's case in point: Toyota Conversations, a site that aggregates tweeted news, images and video about Toyota, Toyota's own Twitter feed, and other crucial information for Toyota owners affected by the recall. It's not often that you come across a corporate site with links to stories that criticize the company, as in "How Will GM Deal With Its Recall? Blame it On Toyota."

If you look ahead at the agency business several years out, where will social media fit in, especially once some of the hype dies down? The question occurred to me after hearing a speech by someone I've worked with for over four years now: 360i CEO Bryan Wiener.

Not that Twitter isn't normally in the news, but, sheesh. Between the murmurings earlier this week that it's about to launch a shiny new ad platform and today's announcement of a partnership with Yahoo, it looks as though the-little-tweetstream-that-could is making headlines because it's slowly inching its way toward a business model. But the two roads to revenue signified by these two bits of news diverge in a wood, of sorts. And I'm wondering if Twitter, like Robert Frost, should take the road less traveled.

There have been so many big numbers tossed out about Facebook lately, you'd think the site was in the lottery business. But the number that stands out the most to me is this one: 100 million. That's how many mobile users access Facebook across a range of devices -- actually, it's more than that, and growing daily. The safe bet is in time that the mobile user base will nearly mirror the overall user base, and that most of its usage will derive from mobile users.

Let's just say it: Facebook rules. But I'm not talking about Facebook kicking MySpace to the curb some time ago, or Facebook's user base being much larger than Twitter's. I'm talking about Facebook vs. Google. Social networking vs. search engine-ing. In the last few weeks, I've seen a preponderance of data pointing to a few ways Facebook is ruling -- in ways I never thought it would.

One emerging business model that has caught on in social media is not particularly social at all. The model, especially prominent in supporting the booming social gaming business, allows marketers to target consumers with cost-per-acquisition deals that earn consumers points or virtual currency in the games. Among the best known players in this field is Offerpal, which says it reaches more than 150 million consumers. After missing the company's CEO George Garrick last month both when he was in New York and I was in San Francisco, we finally caught up on the phone for an exclusive interview.

Did I just have a "Watson? Can you hear me?" moment, or another moment of online, over-sharing inanity? The reason I ask is that I just sent my first status update from my Droid on the new Google Buzz. It read: "Testing buzz again. Is anyone out there?" (OK, on the first try, my phone rejected my update, so call it my second.) So far, though, I'm a little clueless on how the navigation works (Buzz has yet to be added to my desktop Gmail), and it doesn't seem that anyone I know is on it. And I've waited a …