Advertisers and marketers are obsessed with social media, but large parts of the U.S. business world remain hesitant or uncertain about using sites like Facebook and Twitter, according to a survey by RatePoint, which found that just 36% of small business owners are using social media to reach consumers. That's about half the rate among larger businesses: earlier this year a survey by KingFishMedia of 457 marketing executives found 72% of respondents said their company had a social media strategy, and the majority of the rest said they will have one in place by next year.

Well, isn't that nice: Facebook will no longer include photographs of ex-girlfriends/boyfriends (and presumably, ex-wives/husbands) in the "Photo Memories" part of the member profile page, according to Mashable, to avoid reminding users of their past relationships. The change in policy was prompted by a Facebook protest group, I Hate Photo Memories, made up of people who can't stand to be reminded of their own emotional failures, including their inability to sustain a normal relationship because of their fear of intimacy. Separately, their mothers would also like to know when they are going to get married and have some grandchildren already?

Social networks carry a number of risks for users who are gullible or share too much information, including burglary, scams, stalking, and divorce. Now you can add deportation to the list.

An intercepted dispatch from Mark Zuckerberg: We think of Cliques as the basic unit of users' social networks -- but we also recognize it doesn't end there. In fact users can create and inhabit myriad social groupings, limited only by their imagination and psychological motivations. And what could be more human than distorting relationships to construct a flattering self-image? That's why we introduced a new group-within-a-group feature for Cliques, called Claques. Basically, we realize not everyone in a particular Clique may be equally supportive of your petty achievements, superficial opinions, and shallow insights.

A few weeks ago I took issue with Malcolm Gladwell's article in The New Yorker attempting to debunk the notion that social media can enable "real" social activism, meaning risky confrontations with injustice involving existential danger. But Breast Cancer Awareness Month is doing a better job refuting Gladwell than I ever could, by inverting the stereotyped model of social activism he describes in his article.

I'm not an uncritical supporter of social media, and I certainly don't drink the social media Kool-Aid, as some commentators have uncharitably alleged. I know social media has its problems and drawbacks, and I am troubled by some of its effects on people and society. But I must disagree with the growing chorus of criticism blaming social media "addiction" for all kinds of woes, including the further disintegration of the American family, because this confuses cause and effect, symptom and disease. Facebook isn't killing the American family -- Americans are.

In some situations even a total, humiliating reversal can't quite lay a bad idea to rest. This is doubly true when the bad idea involves corporate tinkering with a familiar and maybe even beloved icon, as Coca-Cola learned with its embarrassing retreat from New Coke back in the 1980s; even after restoring Coca-Cola Classic, the company faced a barrage of questions from marketers and shareholders. Like: what, exactly, the hell were you guys thinking? Did you even do consumer research before making this change? If so, how could your consumer research be so dreadfully wrong? Are you sure the subjects …

Any doubts about the ascendancy of the Internet should be removed by a new global survey from TNS called "Digital Life," which found that the Internet is the most-used medium among people with online access. Specifically, around the world 61% of people with online access used the Internet every day, versus 54% for TV, 36% for radio, and 32% for newspapers.

While everyone is trying to figure out what goes into planning an effective social media campaign, the most engaging social media marketing is often unplanned, at least from my perspective: it's interesting to see how brands play it by ear when things take an unexpected turn. The latest example is the Gap, which appears to be embarking on a social crowd-sourcing project for its new logo, more or less spontaneously, after the first logo redesign met with a not-so-positive public response. It's kind of funny that a corporate logo redesign can inspire such a hullabaloo, but there's no question that …

The social media boom has paved the way for a veritable gold rush of businesses providing social media security services to parents worried their children might be targeted by predators (or do something really stupid, all by themselves) on online social networks. For example this week brought news that SocialShield, a service which launched in June and lets parents monitor kids' social networks use, raised $10 million in its first round of venture capital financing.