When it comes to social media, it’s best to start with a solid listening strategy. And while you’re fine-tuning the “what, where, when and how” as you’re eavesdropping on conversations around the social web, remember that while analysis can be assisted through technology, it’s by no means a fully automated process.

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A U.S. District Judge dismissed a lawsuit against Facebook by Power.com Thursday, the latest move in a back-and-forth legal battle between the two social-media services.

In December, Facebook blocked Power.com, a site that links members’ social-networking accounts, from accessing Facebook profiles. It also sued the company, accusing it of trademark and copyright violations.

Power.com countersued Facebook in July. Its founder, Steve Vachani, has noted that sites such as Twitter, MySpace and Google’s (GOOG) Orkut enable access from Power.com and said at the time that his suit was “about users’ control of their data.” It brought on as legal counsel Scott Bursor, who fought Verizon Wireless (VZ) and Sprint (S) in early-termination-fee disputes.

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As you’ve likely heard by now, the Federal Trade Commission is trying to reign in freebie-grabbing bloggers and graft-happy social media users masquerading as unbiased critics. The agency announced an update to the FTC Act of 1980, the requisite guidelines for consumer endorsements and testimonials. For many, the takeaway has been this: Bloggers Must Disclose Every Single Freebie Sent to Them From Companies–or Pay an $11,000 Fine. Scary.

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When it comes to social-networking sites, women are more plugged in than men, according to data analysis by Brian Solis, president of Silicon Valley public-relations firm Future Works.

Mr. Solis used Google (GOOG) Ad Planner to determine the gender breakdown of users signed up for the most popular social-networking sites and found that in most cases, women outnumbered men. “The point of interest that’s worth review and discussion is that in social media, women rule,” he wrote.

For example, the data show that on Facebook, 57 percent of users are women and 43 percent are men, with the same gender breakdown on Twitter and Yelp. On MySpace, it’s a whopping 64 percent female, and on the social-network-creation site Ning, 59 percent of users are women. There’s slightly more equitable gender distribution on YouTube, which is half women and half men, and professional-networking site LinkedIn has the same gender breakdown. On the photo-sharing site Flickr, women make up 55 percent of users, as they also do on FriendFeed.

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Corporations continue to get blindsided by social media –which of course, is just a representation of underlying customer or product issues that should be fixed. Companies respond in three ways: 1) Ignore it and do nothing at their own peril, 2) Are responsive but not necessarily in control 3) Assert themselves and be proactive–even during a crises. The following three examples highlight companies being proactive in the third effort–and analyzes their end result.

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Sylvester Chisom began paying a consultant last summer to blog on Twitter, post status updates on Facebook and run marketing campaigns on both sites for his auto-detailing business.

He thinks the service, which costs $450 a month, is worth it. “It’s just better having somebody else dedicated to thinking of stuff to put up,” says Mr. Chisom, co-owner of Showroom Shine Express Detailing LLC in St. Louis.

Some small-business owners, overwhelmed by the time commitment required of marketing their products and services via social media, are hiring consultants to lend a hand. But the price of such support can vary widely based on the extent of work involved, and many entrepreneurs with already meager resources for marketing and advertising may need to think carefully before taking on the extra cost.

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A little over a week ago Facebook reached a major milestone: 300 million active users. The fastest-growth region continues to be Asia, but growth in other overseas regions such as the Americas and Africa have also been strong. Currently reaching only 1% of potential users in Asia and Africa, Facebook has barely scratched the surface in both regions.

Growth in the U.S. remains fastest among those age 45 and older, and the share of those users is higher in the U.S. than overseas. In other regions recent growth tended to be more evenly divided among age groups. One notable exception has been the teen group in Asia, which grew over 80% in the last 12 weeks.

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By now the arguments are familiar: Facebook is ruining our social relationships; Google is making us dumber; texting is destroying the English language as we know it. We’re facing a crisis, one that could very well corrode the way humans have communicated since we first evolved from apes. What we need, so say these proud Luddites, is to turn our backs on technology and embrace not the keyboard, but the pencil.

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If the ongoing social networking revolution has you scratching your head and asking, “Why do people spend time on this?” and “How can my company benefit from the social network revolution?” you’ve got a lot in common with Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski.

Only difference: Piskorski has spent years studying users of online social networks (SN) and has developed surprising findings about the needs that they fulfill, how men and women use these services differently, and how Twitter–the newest kid on the block–is sharply different from forerunners such as Facebook and MySpace.

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Twitter has turned out to be a useful tool for some small businesses coping with customer-service or public-relations crises.

The social-media service–where users send short “tweets” to followers who have signed up to receive the messages–came in handy for Innovative Beverage Group Holdings Inc., whose drankbeverage.com site crashed last month after a surge in traffic following a segment on Fox News for the company’s so-called relaxation beverage, which contains “calming” ingredients like valerian root and melatonin. News Corp. (NWS) owns Fox News as well as The Wall Street Journal.

Innovative Beverage notified consumers on its Twitter feed that it was working to resolve the problem. The company also did a search on Twitter for mentions of the site crash, so it could respond with tweets describing its repair efforts.

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Two Australian girls, lost in a storm drain, recently used their cellphones to update Facebook to alert people about their predicament rather than calling emergency services. Some reports indicate they also took the time to complete a “Which Smurf Are You Quiz,” and got the result “Dangerously Oblivious Smurf.”

This could be a trend.

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Its 17 declarations on the future of journalism in the age of the internet have been discussed worldwide.

As soon as it came out, it was spread all over the net: 15 German journalists and bloggers wrote an “Internet Manifesto” on how journalism works today. Shortly after it was announced online, their server went offline. The reaction was overwhelming.

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A growing number of businesses are tracking social-media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter to gauge consumer sentiment and avert potential public-relations problems.

Ford Motor Co. (F), PepsiCo Inc. (PEP) and Southwest Airlines Co. (LUV), among others, are deploying software and assigning employees to monitor Internet postings and blogs. They’re also assigning senior leaders to craft corporate strategies for social media.

One morning last December, Scott Monty, Ford’s head of social media, saw Twitter messages alerting him to online comments criticizing Ford for allegedly trying to shut a fan Web site, TheRangerStation.com. The dispute prompted about 1,000 email complaints to Ford overnight.

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Social media may seem, at times, to be a flurry of meaningless updates and marketing schemes, but researchers are figuring out how the interaction it spurs can stimulate brain activity.

“We’ve evolved to interact with the world,” said Patricia Kuhl, a University of Washington professor and co-author of a recent study on social learning. “We did not evolve to lie in front of a flat screen and just watch it,” even if what it’s spewing at us is informative or entertaining. One reason for this is that the social part of the brain affects which computational skills a person picks up.

Take a recent study, which showed how social interaction plays into learning languages. Japanese-speaking students took English lessons through an interactive and self-monitored computer program.

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As more diverse organizations dive into web marketing, for-profit organizations can learn well from their indie counterparts about experimentation and innovation online. A few notable community and arts groups have been inventive in their use of social media and truly collaborative in their outreach in ways that even the most seasoned corporate marketer can appreciate.

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