A recent Adweek article discusses how difficult it is to create social media applications — especially the corporate branded apps in Facebook. It underscores the essentially flighty and viral nature of social media; like pop music and reality TV stars, there is a limited appeal to many of these efforts.

Brands, in general, have found Facebook unforgiving terrain for marketing. It’s well known, for instance, that banner ads perform poorly on the site … But the Facebook Platform, launched 18 months ago — which lets developers create social applications for users — was thought to offer the perfect opportunity to move beyond banners to provide “branded utility.” So far, however, Facebook apps from brands like Coca-Cola, Champion, Ford and Microsoft are as popular as desolate Second Life islands.

Read the full article.

Writing My Twitter Etiquette Article: 14 Ways to Use Twitter Politely

Every form of communication deserves an etiquette manual, if only so we can treat our fellows better, even in 140-character bites. MARGARET MASON’S 14-point guide to improved tweets.

(via the Morning News)

Mashable assembled a list of more than 35 companies who are experimenting with social media in a host of different ways. This list is by no means exhaustive, and it represents a wide variety of businesses, industries and social media tools.