Professional football players really seem to love their Twitter, which is usually great for fans and reporters: despite rules preventing them from tweeting during games, tweets from the off the field -- say, during rough preseason practices -- can still provide a picture into their tactics, motivation and morale. But the events surrounding the group humiliation and shaming of Chicago Bears quarterback Jay Cutler leave me no choice but to bust out some advice for the footballers: Gentlemen, talking trash on Twitter just makes you look like a bunch of whiny wusses.

Success can be deadly: just look at the dinosaurs, who got so big they needed an executive assistant brain in their butt -- then ceded the planet to those quick, smart little mammals. Recognizing that the same thing can happen to corporations, Google's top management surprised the business world this week with the announcement that Eric Schmidt is stepping down from his position as CEO, handing over the reins to co-founder Larry Page, who previously served as CEO from 1998-2001, while co-founder Sergey Brin is giving up the title of president.

It might not be the best advertising adjacency, but social media has huge potential for collecting and disseminating information and helping coordinate disaster responses, according to Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator Craig Fugate, who told reporters that FEMA will make more use of social media (including mobile access) during future emergencies.

Nobody much likes bankers nowadays, and I'm no different. I also try to maintain a healthy skepticism about the surging value of social media companies, since the nascent social media market has many characteristics of a bubble. So it feels odd to be sticking up for Goldman Sachs following its Big Fat Facebook Flop. But this fiasco -- however satisfying it may be in terms of schadenfreude -- strikes me as another instance of pointless, counter-productive regulatory intervention.

Some kinds of business just seem to lend themselves to social media integration. Obviously the more consumer-facing the business is, the more sense it makes to use social media: I can't really see, say, steelmakers or shipbuilders jumping on the social media band wagon. Sports and leisure, on the other hand, couldn't be better-suited: most of these activities are inherently social, and now technology allows brands to both exploit and encourage the special kind of emotional engagement which results from doing something as part of a group. Thus the winter of 2010-2011 has seen ski resorts rushing to introduce proprietary, …

Okay, this settles it: we are in the midst of a social media bubble, and it is getting bigger at an alarming rate. Worse, it is about to ascend to the next stage of insanity -- and become a Bonafide Bubble -- as companies go public and everyone is invited to get rich quickly and effortlessly by doing the same thing as all the other people trying to get rich quickly and effortlessly. What is all this doom and gloom based on? Since December the estimated value of Groupon, the social deal juggernaut with plans to go public in the …

There's no question that social media is the hottest part of the Internet from an advertising and marketing perspective, with companies big and small pinning their hopes on its huge potential for engaging consumers and propagating messages through word-of-mouth. But that doesn't mean they're actually doing it right, as reflected by endemic self-doubt among marketing execs at 2,100 companies surveyed by the Harvard Business Review Analytics Services on behalf of SAS.

They may be casual, but social games are serious business, according to the latest report from eMarketer, which predicts total revenues for social gaming will increase 27.7% from $856 million in 2010 to $1.09 billion in 2011. In terms of players, the number of U.S. Internet users who play at least one game a month on a social network will increase from 53 million in 2010 to 62 million in 2011 -- roughly 27% of the total online audience.

Although I have expressed skepticism about the threat posed by Facebook to Google in the past, J.P. Morgan analyst Imran Khan says the threat is quite real in a note to investors circulated on January 3rd. Khan bases this analysis on the proportion of traffic to large commercial sites coming from the two sources, Facebook and Google.

Previously I wrote about Facebook being the first truly global medium, a fact highlighted by its nearly 600 million members -- just about twice the size of the U.S. population. It's still growing, and it's quite conceivable it will pass one billion members sometime this year -- offering online advertisers reach on a scale never before offered by a single platform. But it's also becoming increasingly clear that Facebook's penetration varies significantly from country to country.