E-CONSULTANCY.COM — In March the UK’s Daily Telegraph reported that 700,000 businesses in the UK had active accounts. and across the blogosphere and in company boardrooms the platform is being breathlessly talked up as the future of online customer communication. But, hyperbole aside, how well does Twitter work as a channel for reaching customers and generating sales? With one or two exceptions (most notably Dell, which has claimed several million dollars in revenue from Twitter), few businesses have used Twitter to drive significant sales. Studying the Twitter profiles of some major UK online retailers and analysing available data suggests that, as far as business is concerned,Twitter is yet to live up to its hype...

THE GUARDIAN — Twitter's growth seems to have lost its momentum, according to a new study. Growth in the micro-blogging service's number of users peaked at nearly 20% last April, but had dropped down to 0.15% in December 2009, says a study by Barracuda Networks. Recent web analytics had already suggested that Twitter had reached its peak, as Twitter.com recorded a traffic high in July 2009 and has never reached that level since. According to Compete, Twitter reached 23.5 million users in August 2009 and stayed put. However, as Twitter client applications have grown and have become a bigger percentage of Twitter's user base, the numbers didn't necessarily reflect the actual situation of the micro-blogging service. By using the growth in Twitter users, instead of the site's traffic, the Barracuda study now puts things into perspective...

GIGAOM — Maybe Thomson Reuters was feeling nostalgic about the flurry of negative attention that both the New York Times and the Washington Post got last year when they came out with policies on the use of social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook. For whatever reason, the wire service recently issued new guidelines for its staff, and they suffer from many of the same problems that both the NYT and WaPo policies did. All of these flaws boil down to one thing: A desire to control something that fundamentally can’t be controlled, and a fear of what happens when that control is lost...

MEDIAPOST — Mobile social networking is gaining ground. As of January, 17.1% of U.S. mobile subscribers went to a social networking site or blog compared to 13.8% in October, according to new data from comScore MobiLens. The Web measurement firm last week reported Facebook and Twitter have both seen triple-digit traffic growth on the mobile Web in the last year, reaching U.S. audiences of 25.1 million and 4.7 million, respectively. (MySpace's mobile site dropped 7% to 11.4 million.) Highlighting broader growth, Facebook recently announced cracking 100 million active mobile users worldwide...

MARKETINGPROFS — Unprecedented change brought on by a volatile economy and the rise of new marketing channels is creating opportunities for marketers—and leading the way for widespread adoption of emerging tactics such as social media, rich media, and mobile marketing, according to a survey of online and direct marketers by Unica and Salloway & Associates. Over eight in ten marketers (84%) use or plan to use at least one emerging marketing tactic (social media, rich media, or mobile marketing) in the next year. Among marketers, 47% now use social media for marketing, and 23% plan to use it in the next 12 months...