The well choreographed Mark Owen affair unfolding in the British papers is a lesson in how celebrity indiscretions can be managed without apparent loss of reputation or a dent in earning power.

The photos of sad, charmingly scruffy Owen, reflecting we imagine, his tortured, repentant state - his downcast yet forgiving wife at the door of their Wandsworth home - it’s so right, it could be from a Take That Christmas video.

And there’s the killer reference to Robbie Williams, Owen’s pal who is helping him through his alcohol problems - the perfect image reference point. Whoever put this together is some sort of PR Jedi.

The Tiger Woods affair(s), on the other hand was not so much image management, as a cautionary tale. Woods finally hired a PR adviser this week - Ari Fleischer whose previous clients include..George W Bush.

Fleischer has some experience of golf related issues - back in 2002 it was Bush’s antics on the golf course rather than off it that caused a few red faces, specifically this video clip:

“Now watch this drive“:

Shoe brands VANS and Converse along with Starbucks and Skittles were the four fastest growing Facebook brands this week, according to Inside Facebook, a blog that monitors fan pages.

While VANS and Converse may be benefiting from the consolidation of old Facebook fan pages into one main page, Skittles appears to be growing due to a voucher offer which allows registered fans to buy two packets of Skittles for the price of one (BOGOF).

Outside of consumer brands, the top twenty is dominated by pop stars, footballers and social media games. From a British perspective, good to see hit TV programme House, starring Hugh Laurie make an appearance at number 20 with a gain of 65,800 fans following its return to TV screens last week.

The overall rankings for brands’ fans on Facebook looks like this, Starbucks (6.1m) Coca-Cola (5.1m) Skittles (3.9m) Nutella (3.6m)  Pringles (3m).

This week’s fastest risers chart below.

LinkedIn was the favourite social media site for professionals at work in 2009, with 86% of worldwide internet users referring to it, a jump of 24% on 2008.

The survey from internet security firm FaceTime Communications shows that most professionals use LinkedIn to network with colleagues (79%), to learn about colleagues (66%) and for general research (61%). Only 37% were using LinkedIn for marketing to customers.

While only 13% said they used Twitter in 2008 for work purposes, the number leapt to 76% in 2009, overtaking Digg, Delicious and YouTube in the professional social networking pecking order though these also experienced substantial increases.

Facebook is still regarded as mainly a personal social networking site and in another survey reported in eMarketer, by Liberty Mutual, three quarters of employees thought it was unacceptable to check Facebook at work, though nine out of ten in the FaceTime survey confessed to doing so.

Personal email however is seen as much more acceptable with two thirds of US users polled by Liberty Mutual having no problem with it.

A survey into the perceived risks of social networking to organisations has found most employers unprepared for potential employee misuse, according to Brisbane City News.

Conducted by social media legal specialists, Rostron Carlyle, spokesperson Malcolm Burrows, said while 76 per cent of respondents claimed they used social networking sites at work, 54 per cent said their work place did not have a social media policy.

“When it comes to legal safeguards, it seems most are unsure what to do, or simply underestimate the dangers involved,” Burrows said. “Social media comes with serious risks, such as loss of confidential information, breach of copyright and privacy, discrimination, defamation, even infringement of industry specific legislation.”

The survey also found that while 55 per cent of companies fear social media will affect their business reputation, few precautions have been put in place to protect it. 

“These results show that businesses generally have one of two reactions to social networking take an open slather approach and allow its use without limitation, or ban it completely,” Burrows said.

“Most employers don’t understand the legal risks associated with social networking and ignore the serious commercial implications a lack of forethought can have.”

Several respondents reported incidents of discipline and even dismissal in their workplace following the misuse of social media but only 3 per cent of businesses had updated their employment contracts to take account of the new phenomenon.

Excerpt from Australian news programme The Hungry Beast on why Google is actually quite scary:

During an average PR week, there’s usually a journalist somewhere moaning online about how PR people pitch to them, typically large attachments that crash in-boxes, irrelevancy or email box bombing.

No doubt you could hear the same number of moans from PR people about journalists, tales of junior account handlers reduced to tears, staggering arrogance, but of course you don’t, because you don’t bite the hand that feeds your client’s stories into the marketplace, you bite your tongue instead.

Having said that, it’s understandable that journalists may occasionally crack under an onslaught of badly researched pitches, inspiring no doubt this funny send-up of a silicon valley start-up PR embargo. I shouldn’t laugh, but I did.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has conceded that 140 characters are not always enough to get your message across, especially when it comes to summarising the amazing growth of your micro-blogging site in the last year.

Stone used 1552 characters in his email newsletter to account holders yesterday, offering some insight to the highlights of Twitter’s ‘annus miraculous’

Accounts opened were up 1,500%, Twitter employees rose 500% to 146 - the latest being Aaron, “an engineer focused on building internal tools to help promote productivity, communication, and support within our company. We celebrated with a little dance party.”

Stone mentions the new features introduced - Twitter lists, retweets and mobile apps, plus the humanitarian and charitable uses Twitter has been put to, “Twitter is more than a triumph of technology — it is a triumph of humanity. Projects like Fledgling and Hope140 were inspired by you.”

In a veiled reference to the huge proportion of unused accounts, estimated to be 83% of the 50 million plus opened, Stone says in the opening paragraph “If you haven’t visited in a while, we’d like to invite you to come have a look at http://twitter.com — we’ve been busy!”

According to estimates from blog Inside Facebook, revenue for the pre -eminent social network is expected to exceed $1bn in 2010.

Revenues have typically doubled each year, according to the research carried out amongst industry experts, from $150m in 2007, to $300m in 2008 and so on, with advertising revenue from fan pages believed to be the main driver.

2009 is seen as an important transitionary year for the site which grew to more than 350m monthly active users, from 150m at the beginning of the year. Of those, 100m were in the US and another 100m were in Europe - the two markets where brand advertising brings in the most money.

Brand advertising is estimated at $225m for 2010 and Inside Facebook predicts this stream could eventually grow to $20bn, taking share away from more established sites like Yahoo and MySpace.

As a private company, Facebook do not release their actual figures but provided this quote:

“Facebook is a private company, and we do not publicly disclose our financial results.  We understand there is a great deal of interest and curiosity in our past and potential financial performance.  However, external attempts to forecast revenue are fundamentally speculative and should be treated as such.  We’re focused on building our business to be successful over the long-term.”

Chief marketing officers in the US are quickly increasing their predicted social marketing budgets, finds a survey from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the American Marketing Association, reported in eMarketer today.

Marketers researched in January 2010 now say their percentage spend on social media will increase further than they were predicting just six months previously. Their estimates show that in five years social media will represent 20% of their budgets.

Across sectors, B2B spending is expected to be in line with B2C except in the B2B products category.

B2B marketers see customer relationship management and brand-building to be the priority areas for them in the next year with social marketing seen as an ideal channel for delivery due to its effectiveness in boosting brand engagement and loyalty.

Social media is proving a valuable crisis communication tool for people affected by the Chile earthquake.

Mashable reports that one woman was able to track down her sister-in-law via Twitter using local hashtags which were picked up by a man in Santiago who was able to confirm her safety. Photos of the aftermath have been uploaded to Twitter and Twitpic, providing a photo log of the destruction.

Google has launched a version of its person finder application for Chile, to aid  those looking for or offering information about friends and family.

On Facebook, pages like Chile Earthquake have sprung up, with 8,500 fans creating links, photos, videos and links to Google’s person finder.

Google’s Crisis Response page also shows how people can make donations to Unicef and Direct Relief International using the company’s checkout service. That Crisis Response site has links to YouTube, Maps and News with Chile earthquake information and resources.

Ustream.tv has channels broadcasting live reports with accompanying social streams also containing requests for information on people caught up in the disaster.