I’ve been in the social media space now for quite a few years and I meet with at least 5 companies each week who have understood the importance of utilizing social media for their businesses but are still afraid of entering their brands into the new media age.

What are they worried about? Here are the top five concerns that I’ve heard from executives and my response to them:

1) They’re afraid they’ll lose control of their brand and open themselves up to negative feedback.

When you open a business and start marketing your services and exposing your brand to others, people will start talking about your brand. And this is what you wanted right? This is why you exposed them to your brand in the first place. People are going to be talking about your brand no matter what.

The question is:

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Last night at the monthly Tokyo 2.0 event, Google Mobile Product Managers  Riku Inoue & Brad Ellis from Google Japan, gave a presentation entitled Convergence and beyond.

In my opinion the most interesting part was during the Q&A session that followed, I asked if Google had plans to add people or face recognition to Google Goggles? This would be possible since: Picassa has face recognition, Flickr has added people tagging, and of course Facebook has support for tagging people in photos.

Riku and Brad’s response was Google has person recognition working in a Google internal build of Goggles, but the feature was removed in the publicly released version due to privacy concerns.

However they also said, Google hasn’t given up on the feature and are trying to find the right approach to make sure people’s privacy is taken into account. When they do, the People recognition feature will be added to the public version of Goggles.

The 14 min. Google Japan presentation can be watched below in full

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Those of us immersed in social media know it can be a bit dry at times. Digital agency and marketing firm Dotbox stepped up to the plate and spiced things up when Parfums de Coeur approached them with their new fragrance, BODY HEAT. The catch though, was forgoing traditional marketing practices and instead going viral with the campaign.

Sure, there are many companies that’d like to go viral with their campaigns, but it’s not nearly as easy as it sounds. Dotbox decided to put a face — and body — behind the brand, and organized an online competition backed by the power of social media to choose just that, dubbed the “Hottest Bod in the World.”

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In October 2009, after 2.5 years of using Twitter every day, I wrote a piece that explained the limits of Twitter that we’ll have to look past Twitter to see solved, because Twitter doesn’t seem to be trying to solve them.

Tomorrow, we hear, Google will announce a product that aims to take on Twitter. If so, here’s a list of features to look for. Any of these features would give Google a serious edge over Twitter. Maybe they thought of some things I don’t have on my list. It’s always nice to put your stake in the ground. I did it with the iPad with some hilarious results.

So here’s the list of must-have features:

1. Reliability. Twitter still has trouble dealing with high-flow events like last night’s SuperBowl. Lots of Fail Whales. So if Google is able to offer reliability, no matter how much of an advantage Twitter’s installed base is, it won’t matter. When Twitter goes down everyone will reassemble on Glitter.

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Update – NetFlix claims that the update in its roadmap was wrong. 1080p streaming will not be coming this year. However, closed captioning and 5.1 surround sound are a go.

Like a fine scotch, Netflix just keeps getting better with age. The company will rolling out 1080p streaming this year for its army  of subscribers.

The company is moving away from DVDs as quickly and strongly as possible, attempting to get out of the saddle of a dying horse. The CEO of Netflix has expressed pessimism with physical formats, a bold move for a company that was built on shipping DVDs at light speed.

The company will also be addressing a long time gripe among its customers, the 1080p streaming will support 5.1 surround sound. Many users through time were annoyed when some streams, labeled HD, did not have surround sound.

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All those pesky Windows 7 battery issues? Nothing to fret about says Microsoft, Windows 7 is operating as it should be.

The battery warnings that are cropping up among upgraders to Windows 7 are in fact correctly labeled, says Microsoft. The company has stated that the reason that the batteries are being flagged for replacement is  that they are not performing up to specification. Simple enough.

Not performing well, and you should around to perhaps “consider replacing your battery,” as the warning in Windows 7 goes. Please note that the warnings for battery replacement are new to Windows 7.

This is why people who upgrade from an earlier flavor of Windows have been consued when the errors appeared.

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Apple products repair company iResQ claim to have their furry paw all over the parts for the iPhone 4G (note that the name is a fabrication).

We have put the images below for your viewing pleasure. Notes and a second picture after the jump. From left to right, iPhone 3G, 3Gs, and the purported 4G:

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Updated – please see the end of the post.

4-chan has reportedly been blocked on Verizon Wireless devices.

In a statement on the official 4-chan status blog, the site’s enigmatic founder ‘moot’ claimed, “we’ve received confirmation from Verizon’s Network Repair Bureau (NRB) that we are ‘explicitly blocked.’”

While it does not appear that the block has extended to Verizon’s FIOS or Home Broadband services, moot also claimed that Verizon users from these services had been complaining about intermittent outages over the past few weeks.

At this time, Verizon Wireless is claiming that “some 4-chan sites were disrupting our network.”

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With the number of players that we now have in the global smartphone market, the battle for market share is becoming increasingly cutthroat.

If you want to grow faster than the product category as a whole, you have to take that market share from someone else. Lose too much market share, and your products just might be marginalized to nothing.

For the quarter ending in December 2009, versus the preceding three months, Android (Google’s offering) jumped from 2.5% to 5.2%. That equates to a 108% rise in just three months.

That was the good news. On the other side of the aisle, much of that gained market share seemed to come at the expense of Palm, which slid from 8.3 to 6.1%.

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