Jack and Jill, bread and cheese, Facebook and Twitter – the pairing seems to have stuck. But assuming these two rule the roost when it comes to social networking, does one or other predominate? If a business had to choose between them, which would it be?

There’s a fascinating piece here by Scott Moir that examines this question in some detail.

Starting with some stats: Facebook users spend around 32 minutes each day on the site, while for Twitter the figure is around eight minutes. So Facebook clearly has the edge there.

It also is more easily compared to a stand-alone website than Twitter, as you can include photos, detailed information, videos and other business applications. Many small businesses rely wholly on Facebook.  Business-related Twitter accounts, by contrast, tend to link to a blog or website to get that kind of flexibility.

But Twitter has a lot of advantages over Facebook, and surveys suggest it is preferred as a business marketing tool, thanks to its viral qualities. Tweets get distributed widely and quickly, which makes its reach much greater.

Lots more interesting stuff here.

Dr Andrew Currah, research fellow from Oxford University, who specialises in the digital economy, has joined our blogging team and will be posting regularly.

His first post this week looked at the controversy surrounding Google’s introduction of Buzz.

We are really pleased to have Andrew working alongside us and there are plans for him to get involved in other work we are doing for all our forward-thinking clients – existing and future ones.

We are sure that you will find Andrew’s insights provocative and useful over the coming months.

I’d also like to thank Rob McLuhan for all his on-going incisive blog commentaries and comments for us on the emerging world of social media.

Fortune Magazine (March 1) has a fascinating short comment piece by Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, on the decline of newspapers.

Wales says that the quality of content created by some consumers is now much higher than that created by newspapers.

‘Already there’s a large movement of consumers generating all kinds of information online, and in many cases the quality is much higher than the content produced by media companies. This doesn’t mean people don’t trust newspapers but they’ve lost their exclusivity as an authoritative voice,’ he says.

The whole ecosystem of news is changing radically with blogs, tweets, YouTube videos all competing for attention. Newspapers are operating in a totally different environment which obviously has massive implications for managers of corporate news and guardians of brands. In the words of US social media commentator, Clay Shirky, ‘Here Comes Everybody’!

Managing news from a corporate perspective and brand perspective is about managing the process of news, managing the flow of information, and that means making corrections, putting news in context, linking to interesting sources of information, inviting comments and collaboration. For more insights on this development read Jeff Jarvis on Buzzmachine.

Some broadsheet journalists used to be treated as high priests talking from the pulpit, but no more. A gust of online democracy – messy, creative, collaborative, rowdy, disrespecful, well-informed, insightful and fast – has burst in, and it’s not stopping. Facilitated by broadband, spurred on by mobile companies, the battle is about organising all the information that is available.

It’s time for companies to bring down the firewalls and get involved with these new technologies, internally and externally. Now it’s a very different game. It doesn’t matter which school you went to, it’s about the quality of your ideas and insights, the influence you carry online and the attention you are gaining. The audience is no longer passive. They were once glued to their seats watching the action passively unfold in front of them. Now they are on centre stage: online reality, it’s 24/7 and it’s fast.

There are two important lessons to be learned from the negative buzz surrounding Google’s recent Gmail update, an ill-fated attempt to mimic platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

The first is that top-down and centralised approaches to social media innovation are doomed to failure. Although tested internally by some 20,000 engineers and sales professionals, Google buzz was never fully thought through. As Charles Arthur comments in Media Guardian, the launch design of buzz reflects a ‘failure of the engineering imagination to deal with the reality of human interaction’. Google’s products and services now permeate our lives and careers; but the culture that gives rise to those products and services remains surprisingly (and stubbornly) insular.

Which leads to the second lesson: that the design, testing and launch of social media innovations all require the same openness and transparency that social media has brought to society, business and government more generally. Rather than simply trying to throw social media functionality into the design mix of existing products, companies need to start by carefully understanding the needs and expecations of users – and in turn, how software updates will impact their behaviour. Social media innovation has to be part of a wider dialogue with users, not the byproduct of competitive mimicry.

With Google now facing a potential investigation by the US Federal Trade Commission, on the basis that it may have broken consumer protection laws, it is clear that open thinking (and testing) of social media is vital both from a commercial and legal perspective.