The leading food brands such as Starbucks, Domonis, Malibu Rum, Canadian Club Whiskey and Handrick's Gin are using various tactics to leverage Social media.  While Starbucks and Dominos are using Foursquare to offer specials, liquor brands such as Mailbu and Canadian Club are using social gifting to entice users.  The value created by social media is not fully measurable yet and a lot of business models still remain to be proved for the long term since most of it is available only to a handful of consumers.  Neverthless, something every brand manager must watch.

According to a report published by e-Marketer 33% of the tweets are about brands and companies.  Users actually use tweets exchange information and reviews on the products and companies they uses.  Interestingly enough while Facebook users also engage themseleves in similar activiites, this practice is more prominent on Twitter.   The study was conducted by ROI Research and commissioned by Performics, a leading online advertising firm.

I cam across this news report that Facebook is borrowing $100 million to buy new servers (this is after a huge investment from MSFT?) and their CTO is leaving the company. While the news reporter is taking it negatively it can also be treated as a growth opportunity. But the real question is why do they really need to borrow $100 million? If the growth is so great then why money is not following? I am sure facebook is possibly facing the same challenges other social networking sites are i.e. how to make money?