Early this year, Burger King made waves with a "Whopper Sacrifice" Facebook app. Google, meanwhile, has achieved Twitter omnipresence with 87 official accounts. But not every company has tons of free hamburgers and/or employees lying around, so a like-named session at SES Chicago addressed the matter of "Social Media for the Little Guy." (Coverage of SES Chicago continues at WebProNews Videos . Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.

Claiming a Twitter profile name seems to be the new domain squatting, so I thought it would be interesting to see how many top brands have claimed what would be their first choice Twitter handle. Image credit: Flickr So for example, Sky would presumably like to have claimed twitter.com/sky - but missed out on this to another user. This graph compares which industries have the largest percentage of brands that do not own their branded twitter domain name.

As an early Christmas gift to us Mac users who have been waiting for so long, Google has finally outed Chrome for Mac (beta).  As a bonus, Google has also released Chrome for Linux and activated Chrome Extensions for Chrome users in Windows platform. If you're a Mac user and you haven't downloaded Chrome Beta for Mac, you should - right now.

MySpace announced today that it has completed a deal to acquire "certain assets" of the popular social media music service imeem. imeem is now redirecting to MySpace Music. "MySpace Music and imeem share a common vision and commitment to further enabling the socialization of content across the Web," says MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta. "This deal will allow us to leverage imeems industry leading technology and over time,

U.S. advertising spending in the first nine months of 2009 fell by 14.7 percent compared to the same period in 2008, according to a new report by TNS Media Intelligence. Ad spending during the third quarter of 2009 was down 15.3 percent compared to last year, marking the sixth consecutive quarter of year-over-year declines. There were some bright spots with Internet display (+7%) and newspaper Free-Standing Inserts (FSIs) up 3.9 percent. Online growth was driven by telecom,

by Claudine Zap Our top picks from the day's hottest searches. Victoria Beckham (Searches increased by 2,275%). Fashion crime: Two armed theives staged a daring heist of a delivery van filled with the celeb's dresses . Max Baucus (+759%). Critics say the Montana senator is distracting his work on health care reform with news that he nominated his girlfriend for the U.S. Attorney job. U.S. Mint coins (+303%). Collectors,

comScore (NASDAQ : SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today reported holiday season retail e-commerce spending for the first 36 days of the November â?" December 2009 holiday season. For the holiday season-to-date, nearly $16 billion has been spent online, marking a 3-percent increase versus the corresponding days last year. The most recent week ending December 6 reached $4.6 billion in holiday spending,

Rupert Murdoch spoke last week at the FTC's journalism and the Internet workshop and again slammed news aggregators and search engines: "And yet there are those who think they have a right to take our news content and use it for their own purposes without contributing a penny to its production. Some rewrite, at times without attribution, the news stories of expensive and distinguished journalists who invested days,

A little less than a month ago, we reported that a beta version of Chrome for Mac might be released in December, and sure enough, it's arrived. Something "[f]or Mac OS X 10.5 or later, Intel only" became available today. Considering that Chrome was introduced in September of 2008, this development was a long time coming.

Google has been working with the New York Times and the Washington Post on a Google Labs experiment, which the company has unveiled today. It's called Living Stories , and aims to provide a different online news experience by creating a singular page where readers can follow one story line in the news as new developments occur. "A typical newspaper article leads with the most important and interesting news, and follows with additional information of decreasing importance,