As we’ve all heard, Google+ is now up to 25 million visitors after only being in market since June 28^th.  If you can believe it that rate of growth is faster than MySpace, Twitter and even the all mighty Facebook!   If you don’t believe me, check out the chart below:

Does this mean that Google + will one day surpass the popularity of Facebook? That is still left to be answered.  The engagement rates are still not up to par as people are still asking themselves what exactly is Google+ and why it even exits.  So why then is Google+ growing so quickly one might ask? Google has used their existing Gmail base to establish themselves as a true competitor in the social network world and it has worked.

What Google+ now decides to do with its growing user data base and how it will apply to advertisers will be their next big move!   Stay tuned advertising world, this just might change how we buy and use social media!

News broke late last week that Twitter users will begin to see ads in their main stream of tweets from Twitters ad platform.

For the time being, an ad will only appear in the stream if you are already following the account that purchased the ad (but it won’t be too long before ads will appearing wildly and with a scary frequency). The paid-tweets appear at the top of your feed but will gradually get pushed down throughout the day. This brings up a lot of interesting questions about pricing and how much each paid tweet might cost. We are looking to test the platform here at TargetCast so I am hoping we will have some updates about the nuances of the program in the next few weeks.

Twitter also claims the new ads will score double-digital CTR %’s…an interesting claim being that only a few major companies are participating in the initial program. I am, at best, wary of it’s effectiveness for smaller DR-focused clients.

More to come in the next few weeks…

This is very interesting. France has officially banned the names of the top two social networking sites, Facebook and Twitter, from being mentioned on radio or television…UNLESS, they are part of a news story. Dating back to a 1992 decree that says, “mentioning services by name is an act of advertising,” France has taken a stand against both of the social giants.

As described by Christine Kelly, a spokesperson for France’s Counseil Superieur de l’Audiovisuel (CSA), “Why give preference to Facebook, which is worth billions of dollars, when there are many other social networks that are struggling for recognition. This would be a distortion of competition. If we allow Facebook and Twitter to be cited on air, it’s opening a Pandora’s Box– other social networks will complain to us saying, ‘why not us?’”

TechCrunch sums this up nicely, “Instead of referring to specific social networking pages, like saying ‘Find us at Facebook.com/Audi’ or follow us on ‘Twitter.com/Pepsi’ brands will have to skirt around the issue, saying things like ‘Find us on social networking sites!,’ or directing viewers to their community pages and hoping that viewers will just pick up on where to go.”

France has a history of trying to regulate language used on air. According to the Toubon Law,  the French government can mandate the use of the French language in official government publications, in all advertisements, and in all broadcast audiovisual programs, with some exceptions (most notably, private non-commercial communications).

Some say the French government is going overboard in terms of restricting “the spread of American culture” which some bloggers attribute to traditional French protectionism, similar to how in 2003, the French banned the use of the word “email” in all government communications and publications.

In all, the true nature of the ban is not clear, but Facebook and Twitter are certainly making their way across the globe. Think about the earned media the two companies get every day, in every advertisement featuring one of their “brand pages.”

You never know, maybe France does support smaller social networks…or better yet, maybe France is launching their own social network (unlikely), where you have to be French to partake. Didn’t Facebook start with the promise of exclusivity?

Lady Gaga is the biggest artist in the world. With over 8 million people following her Tweets and over 11,000,000 fans on Facebook, she has built herself an army of little monsters through the power of social media. So what’s left when you have built such an impressive army? The answer is simple: harness them. Today, Lady Gaga made an announcement via Facebook to all of her little monster all over the world to join a new facet of her social media onslaught – The Official Lady Gaga Street Team.

The goal of this newly formed Street Team with Fancrops, which promotes social media with a purpose, is a brilliant idea that enables the legions of voracious Lady Gaga fans to take her message and brand even further, faster into the social media stratosphere. After you sign up to be a member of the Street Team, using your existing social media accounts, including Facebook, Twitter, and Itunes, a new team member can choose to complete the tasks assigned.

Tasks include simple things like posting your favorite lyrics from her new single, Born This Way, on Facebook and tagging it via Gaga. Then you simply submit a screen capture of your completed task through the Lady Gaga Street Team website and earn points towards the purchase of Gaga merchandise. Each task is assigned a different value of points (i.e. posting her interview with Jay Leno on Facebook will earn you 50 points, and simply reviewing and rating “Born This Way” on Itunes will earn her little monsters 200 points). It’s really that simple, but this goes way beyond the promise of essentially free merchandise. The true power here, which is yet to be measured, is the ability to not only make your fan base feel more included in your world, but also to pick specific things you want promoted about your brand/message and unleash them into every major form of social media. Paws up everyone! For Lady Gaga, this is only the beginning of her total global domination via all forms of media.

Funny news today about a Twitter bug which can force any account to follow you. Feel like having Megan Fox follow you? Care to impress a few friends as your account shows over a million followers?

According to TechCrunch “the flaw appears when a user tweets this format: “accept [Twitter Username]”. So, for example “accept TechCrunch”. Magically that user appears as one of your followers.”

Try it out if you’d like but as an FYI if Twitter catches you they will reset your account to 0 followers

Not looking to be outdone in the real-time search department, Yahoo! recently announced a partnership with Twitter to integrate real-time content into social experiences on Yahoo!.  Searchers can now view relevant tweets pertaining to the topics in which they are most interested.

Previously, Twitter results were available on Yahoo! via their Yahoo! News Shortcut and for other buzz worthy topics (Yahoo! continuously kept track of search queries, and when there was a spike in interest in a topic, their search algorithm selected relevant tweets to show on the search results page, either as a part of the News shortcut or in a Twitter section).  With this new partnership, Yahoo! has built a real-time index of Twitter feeds, allowing for access to the full public feed of user tweets.

Bryan Lamkin, Yahoo!’s Consumer Products Group SVP, notes that this is just a “part of Yahoo!’s Open Strategy (Y!OS) to make the Web more open and relevant” to its users, promising additional features of the real-time search integration to be launched “later this year”.