On May 26, the Frankfurter Allgemeine published an interview in which Google CEO Eric Schmidt admitted that social networks may not be a suitable venue for online advertising. While many of us have already come to this conclusion, Schmidt’s acknowledgement is newsworthy because it’s the first time that anyone with such status in the industry has conceded that some popular sites where people spend a lot of time may not necessarily be good places to advertise. So what does this mean for sites like MySpace, Facebook and Bebo?

Among the most popular applications on Facebook today are those that allow people to identify themselves in terms of their taste in movies or books, or their similarity to a Harry Potter character or a Disney princess. These applications provide a creative and fun way of sharing information and creating a sense of connection.

According to one of the Disney applications, I’m Mulan. I guess if you have seen the Disney movie, you now know something about me. And that, I think, is the attraction of social networks. They allow us to create communities that stretch across geographies and time zones. It does not matter whether a friend is in New York, New Zealand, China, Italy or Mexico; the News Feed provides a way of staying in touch.

Apparently the Beefeater Yeoman is hiding in my city. Well, apart from the fact that I do not live in a city, one thing is for sure. If I find that Yeoman, I am going to beat him black and blue with his own his halberd. The pop-up ads for Beefeater I’ve recently encountered online make a complete mockery of Madison’s Avenue "don’t interrupt" mantra, and suggest that both Beefeater and The New York Times have little respect for their customers.

The Advertising Research Foundation Annual Conference is one of those events I love to hate. I look forward to catching up with old friends and acquaintances, hopefully making some new ones, and maybe, just maybe, learning something new. The trouble is, it is not easy to focus on the content when parallel presentations are spread across numerous different rooms and alcoholic beverages are readily on hand. The following is some wheat that I managed to sift from the chaff of interminable sales pitches dressed up as new learning, vendors acting like old-time snake oil salesmen, and people seeking to exploit our collective insecurities by suggesting that all we know is no longer valid.

I promised in my last post that I would discuss another article by Umair Haque from his Harvard Business blog. In his post “The New Economics of Brands,” Umair proposes that “the future of communications as advantage lies in talking less, and listening more,” and praises Google as a “living example” of this “deeper truth.”

I’m not going to argue with the idea that brands should listen to what people say about them, but I am going to take issue with another part of Umair’s analysis.