Facebook has already changed the Internet, and many expect it to turn online advertising on its ear as well. While Facebook users go around liking everything all over the web from a growing number of sites that implement its plugins, they are giving Facebook more and more power for the potential targeting of advertising that is truly targeted at them through things that they really do like.

The Like button is a game changer because all of a sudden you have the whole world wide web of content to "like" not just what's within your immediate network within Facebook and what you may have taken the time to add to your profile two years ago. It keeps user interests current and enables an infinite amount of interest indication that advertisers would salivate for.

Facebook could challenge Google's AdSense if they were to release a product for publishers to implement Facebook ads into their sites. And these would be the kinds of ads that users wouldn't be as quick to ignore. In fact, they might even be welcomed with open arms. An ad that is truly relevant is useful to the consumer. And this gives users more reason to keep "liking".

It won't work without the users though. If Facebook loses a lot of users, it won't be quite as attractive to advertisers, but there is nothing indicating that this will happen, despite all of the commentary out there. Facebook is growing. People have already invested a lot of their time and web presence into Facebook, and it this point Facebook is just making it harder and harder to leave as it gets tied into more elements of users' complete online experience. A lot of the people who have talked about deleting their FB profiles have even found it too hard to actually go through with it.

You might have Diaspora and others come along and try to open things up, but at this point, can Facebook really be replaced? 500 million users. To put that in perspective, the U.S. Census Bureau has 309,293,729 for the total U.S. population. They've got the world at 6,821,567,786. Facebook is hardly slowing so far.

Can Facebook really be replaced as THE social network? Tell us what you think.

- The color and size
- Whether or not to include related videos
- Whether or not to display the player border
- Whether or not to play in HD by default -- triggers video resolutions of 1280x720 (720p) or 1920x1080 (1080p)

This week YouTube also expanded its auto-captioning program. This is a tool  that combines some of the speech-to-text algorithms from Google's Voice Search to automatically generate video captions when requested by viewers. More on that here.

Some other highlights from the report:

- The majority of companies have difficulty measuring the return on investment (ROI) from social media. Almost two-thirds of respondents (61%) say their organizations are “poor” (34%) or “very poor” (27%) at measuring ROI.

- Increased traffic to Web site is the business goal that marketers are most likely to be trying to influence through social media marketing. Three quarters (74%) of companies say they use social media to increase traffic.

- Direct traffic to Web site is by far the metric most commonly used to measure the impact of off-site social media, measured by just under two-thirds of company respondents (63%).

- More brand recognition (64%) is the second most important business objective in terms of impact of social media. A similar proportion of respondents (62%) cite better brand reputation.

- Despite the widespread recognition that social media marketing impacts brand reputation and brand visibility, only a quarter of all respondents (25%) surveyed use online brand mentions and brand awareness as a metric for measuring off-site social media success. Just 15% use brand perception as a metric.

- Just over half of companies (56%) say that they try to achieve increased sales through social media activity. But only a quarter of companies (24%) use sales as a metric for measuring social media success.

Facebook is the Web property mostly commonly used in social media, with 85% of companies surveyed using it as part of their marketing strategy. This is followed by Twitter (perhaps more closely than expected, given Facebook's much larger user base) at 77%, LinkedIn at 58% and YouTube at 49%.

Over two-thirds of company respondents say that the amount of money spent on social media has increased since last year, while 30% say it has stayed the same, and 81% of companies expect social media budgets to increase over the next year, while 18% expect spending to stay the same. So while companies are still experimenting, they must be generally seeing good enough results to keep at it, or see the potential to use it on an expanded basis.

Do you have a concrete social media strategy or do you simply experiment? Discuss.

Then the NWS will sic some software upon the reports and decide whether or not the information should be passed on through existing products.

This approach could work quite well, since information will only come from people who are intentionally participating (in comparison, the earthquake system scans for keywords that can be used out of context).  Also, the NWS has made it quite clear that tweets should include geographic info (whereas the earthquake system has to find location info where it can).

Format your storm report tweets to look like #wxreport WW <your location> WW <your signifcant weather report> if you feel like participating.  Do so after taking cover, of course.

Related Articles:

> Gov't Agency Turns To Twitter For Earthquake-Tracking

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> 2009 In Review - According To Twitter