With the recent advances in real time search brands now need to monitor their online reputation more closely than ever before. Coming from a past where the corporate website was the sole online showcase for a brand, 2009 showed us that the search engines have a definite interest in MyFaceFlicSpinTwit, with public views now appearing in the index in real time. This presents a dramatically altered landscape for brand managers and PR agencies in the way that they manage their online presence.

2009 saw a mad dash for the social media real estate and even then uptake was tentative and haphazard, with many companies taking a stand just for the sake of it, simply because of all the buzz around social media, but without actually knowing why they needed it or what the return on the time invested was going to be.

How long does it take before you consider someone a friend, the kind with whom you would share personal information and private details about your life? A day, a week, a month? Would you share details with a friend sight unseen? Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? But according to a recent study in Australia by IT security firm Sophos, Facebook users are not only extremely friendly, they are also extremely trusting.

In 2007, Sophos conducted a study in the UK to determine how willing Facebook users were to give out personal information. The result, 43% of UK Facebookers become friends with a complete stranger, a fake Facebook profile setup by Sophos. This year the study was moved to Australia, and given that two years had passed and that much has been made of privacy and the dangers of revealing too much information online, Sophos expected Facebook users to be much more cautious than before. They were wrong.

Where do you like to hang out online? Do you like the (relatively) clean lines of Facebook or the busy-ness of MySpace, the professionalism of LinkedIn or the casualness of Twitter? Are you aware that your choice of social network is indicative of your social status? Apparently, the invisible castes that delineate the social classes in the real world also apply online.

Nielson Claritas recently conducted a study on the demographics four different social networks (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter) and found that affluent, highly educated people congregate on Facebook, while less affluent, less educated people favour MySpace.

According to the study, nearly 23% of the people on Facebook earn more than $100,000 per year; nearly 42% earn more than $75,000. 37% of MySpace users earn less than $50,000, while only 28% of Facebook users fit into this salary bracket.