Political candidates who use social media in the state of Maryland must disclose their connection to content on social media sites created or maintained by their campaigns, according to one of a number of new rules adopted by a unanimous 4-0 vote by the Maryland State Board of Elections last week. While they are focused on political ads, the new rules in Maryland -- just the fourth state to adopt such rules, after Florida, Wisconsin, and California -- are food for thought for brand and product advertisers.

If anyone ever doubted that marketers must come to grips with social media, that doubt should be removed by the findings of the latest Harris Poll, released earlier this week. In addition to documenting the ubiquity of social media, Harris found that a significant proportion of U.S. adults use social media to complain about or pay compliments to brands.

Journeying back through the mists of time, I remember a period when some people thought every brand and product should have its own, proprietary social network. This idea never quite panned out, because it was very silly: people are unlikely to want to join literally thousands of different social networks, and it's a lot easier to just create a profile for your brand on an existing social network like Facebook. However, the proprietary social network idea is back, and gaining ground, as a business application.

I'm actually kind of surprised this hasn't come up before: according to CNN, divorce lawyers are now mining social media for evidence of misdoings by errant spouses -- joining the ranks of employers snooping on recent college grads and burglars looking for easy marks on vacation. In fact, a survey conducted by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers found 80% of respondents said they'd seen an increase in cases involving social media over the last year. Many divorce attorneys have begun using a site, Flowtown, more commonly used by marketers, to uncover social media profiles by searching for an …

Adults always think "kids nowadays" are somehow qualitatively worse than previous generations; unsurprisingly, this comparison is implicitly flattering to the adults, who remember their childhoods as clean-scrubbed, healthy, respectful and studious little angels. Typically, once we have judged today's kids we start casting around for explanations as to why the little weasels are the way they are -- which is to say, not as good as us. Of course, the rules of this game forbid considering the most obvious explanation -- whatever negative characteristics they have probably reflect their parenting, or lack thereof -- in favor of more marginal environmental …

As everyone and their mother piles on to Facebook for its transgressions against online privacy, it's worth remembering that the site -- along with other social media like Twitter, and the Internet in general -- is a huge force for good. Among other things, it's a tool for spreading information and organizing political dissent in other parts of the world. I kind of doubt that Mark Zuckerberg or the rest of Facebook's management is really aware or cares about this aspect of Facebook's popularity in countries ruled by repressive regimes; they frankly don't seem to share the kind of ideological …

A few weeks ago I wrote about interesting results from a survey of British Internet users by Ofcom, which showed that UK adults were pulling back the amount of information they posted about themselves in online social networks, and scaling back the number of people who they allowed to see it. I wondered if this foreshadowed similar shifts on this side of the pond. Now I have my answer: yes.

The next big online media bubble is here, and it is social media -- at least, in my humble op-ed. There are certainly a lot of signs pointing in that direction, reminiscent of recent bubble markets. Here's a short list of the symptoms ...

Sometimes success tells you as much about a company's weaknesses as its strengths. This is the case with Facebook's recent deal with Zynga Game Network Inc. According to one view Facebook can do whatever it pleases -- including controversial moves to share member information and fiddle with privacy policies -- because of its overwhelming popularity, which gives it a dominant position among online social networks Events like the Zynga deal -- or more specifically, the negotiations leading up to the Zynga deal -- reveal how fragile and precarious Facebook's supposedly dominant position really is.

Amid widespread criticism of Facebook's recent changes and their impacts on user privacy, one of the most damning analyses comes from Jeremiah Owyang, a partner specializing in customer strategy with the Altimeter Group who outlined potential damage to brands in a recent post on his blog, "Web Strategy." Bowing to Owyang's expertise, here's a quick outline of his analysis and critique.