24/7 Wall St. will look at the Twitter posts at Reuters Biz, WSJ, Financial Times, CNN Money, MarketWatch, CNBC, and 24/7 Wall St. each day to see which stocks are most frequently mentioned. It is clear that in this area of social media these tweets are a sign of which companies the Twitter universe is interested in. Together, these financial sites are followed by nearly 1,000,000 Twitter users, which makes them a sizeable sample of Wall St.’s interests. In some cases, we will publish the actual tweets from the sites

Zerhedge: JPMorgan Strategist Lee doesn’t see market needing QE3 . He also missed QE1, QE Lite and QE2

CNN Money: Bank of America in $3 billion mortgage settlementhttp://bit.ly/fUfI0Y

CNN Money: Facebook worth $50 billion after investment – reporthttp://bit.ly/hsCRLi

Reuters: BofA to take $3 billion mortgage settlement charge http://dlvr.it/CZXKZ

Reuters: Hyundai, Kia eye 10 percent 2011 sales rise after strong Dechttp://dlvr.it/CYgHp

Yahoo! Finance: Report says Facebook nets $500 million investment from Goldman Sachs and Russian investor http://yhoo.it/hpG0y5

Yahoo! Finance: Oil climbs above $92, anticipates economic growthhttp://yhoo.it/ey2DYv

DailyFinance: Facebook Valuation Rises to $50 Billion as Goldman Investshttp://aol.it/eU1PIJ

Douglas A. McIntyre

There are indications that Skype could be prevented from doing business in China.  There are rumors that all VoIP systems originating outside the People’s Republic could be blocked. Some analysts see it as a form of censorship. A more cynical view is that China wants to protect the franchises of its state-owned telecom companies including China Telecom, China Mobile (NYSE: CHL), and China Unicom (NYSE: CHU).

The growth of Facebook and Twitter has been mostly in Western nations. Skype probably has a wider geographic customers base, but says that only 6% of its subscribers are in China. Facebook plans to boost marketing in Russia.  Whether it will meet with any resistance from the government there remains to be seen. Facebook’s new $50 billion valuation is almost certainly linked to its expansion potential outside its home market.

Censorship and the control of voice and personal communications has been less significant in countries other than China. Western companies such Research In Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM) have found that some nations with limited free speech rights will only tolerate Western communications technology so far. India has threatened to shut down the BlackBerry network in its country, claiming that “security concerns” are the reason for this decision.  India does not want encrypted data to move freely among its residents.

On the surface, the battle between China and Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) over censored search results and the break in to Google’s e-mail service in the People’s Republic appears to have little relationship with the India BlackBerry censorship issue.  There is much to suggest that the issues of communications control are more similar in these two countries. Local governments are threatened by the free flow of information, so they attack it at its source. The trouble between Google and China did not affect Google’s stock price more because the US-based search company gets so little revenue from China. Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU), the local search engine company, has by far the largest market share in China. Certainly, China’s move to shut down the Google operation there was a great help to Baidu.

Skype, Facebook, and Twitter clearly understand the value of China’s 450 million internet users.  At this point, fewer than one in three people in the People’s Republic are online. The numbers are more staggering in India. Only 7% of India’s nearly 1.2 billion people use the internet. In Russia, 43% of the 139 million people are online. The Russian percentage is still low compared with most developed nations in which the number of people online is greater than 80% of the population.

Facebook’s penetration of the US social media market has not peaked, but it is close. One hundred and fifty million people visited Facebook in America during November. Facebook is the most searched term on Google in the US. Facebook’s new growth in its subscriber base will have to come from overseas. Facebook would probably be very popular in China. The Chinese government has currently banned it.

It will not matter ultimately why China battles Skype, Google, or Facebook. Government interests or the interests of local companies produce the same effect on the three firms. China may be the largest single block today to the rapid growth of microblogging, VoIP, and social networks  in the world. India may decide to follow China’s example. It is too early to know what Russia will do. It does have a local search engine, Yandex. Russians use several large social network sites. There is no information yet about whether the central government prefers them over Facebook, or whether any of these sites are monitored.

The valuations of Facebook, Twitter, and Skype still depend more on growth rates than revenue or profitability. The places they need to grow to continue their expansion may not be available to them

Douglas A. McIntyre

Foreign commercial real estate investors ranked the US as the No.1 location to buy properties. (Reuters)

Oil is unlikely to surge quickly above $100.  (Reuters)

House Republicans will try to repeal the health care law. (Reuters)

Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) has problems with the accuracy of alarm on the iPhone 4. (Reuters)

Google Inc (NASDAQ: GOOG) will create a digital newsstand for newspapers and magazines. (WSJ)

Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) will use a new chip to attract paid entertainment companies. (Reuters)

Skype could become illegal in China. (Reuters)

Oil companies are still waiting for the first approval of new wells in the Gulf of Mexico. (WSJ)

A book distributor will stop shipping books to cash poor Borders Group. (NYSE: BGP) (WSJ)

Large companies seem ready to use the huge amounts of cash on their balance sheets for expansion. (WSJ)

China will allow companies to keep foreign currency profits instead of giving them to the government. The move could undercut inflation and slow the growth of the nation’s reserves. (WSJ)

Bank stocks face difficulties that may keep them from advancing. (WSJ)

The UAW will target foreign car plants to add to its power over manufacturers. (WSJ)

Verizon Wireless will release Google Android-powered phones. (WSJ)

Cooper prices hit a high and are likely to rise. (WSJ)

Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) has worked to protect itself from major disclosures by WikiLeaks. (NYT)

Nintendo means to take back the portable game market with 3D. (NYT)

Rivals to the Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPad are expected to release a huge number of tablet PCs. (NYT)

Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE) stopped sales of American Airlines (NYSE: AMR) tickets. (FT)

Output growth in China and India has slowed but increased in South Korea and Taiwan. (FT)

VW’s CEO got a contract extension as the German car company tries to top Toyota Motor (NYSE: TM) in global sales. (Bloomberg)

Vizio will try to attack Apple with low priced phones and tablets (Bloomberg)

US car sales probably rose in December. (Bloomberg)

Douglas A. McIntyre

Brand loyalty involves emotions as much as it does the logical reasons people become loyal to products. These are the primary forces that allow the best brands endure. Times change and so do brand features. The best brands evolve and change with the people to whom they are important. It is as much an art as a science to consistently find the right mixture or price, design, and features.

24/7 Wall St. looked at a number of famous brands which have been among the most important in America.  We chose from this list ten brands which were highly regarded and to which millions of people had strong attachments. We then identified those which had fallen from the status of most loved brands to that of also-rans, if they were even still existing brands at all.

Here is the list of brands Americans no longer love:

1. Chrysler

Chrysler has been one of the preeminent auto brands in the US since it was founded in 1925. The No. 3 American car company went into Chapter 11 in 2008.  The firm had flirted with bankruptcy in 1979.  The turnaround of the company by Lee Iacocca was one of the great business stories of the last several decades. The company lost some of its identity in 1998 when it merged with Daimler and the German firm took de facto control of management. That year Chrysler had about 17% of the US car market and sold 2.6 million cars and light trucks. Chrysler will be fortunate if it can sell one million cars in America this year. Chrysler is once again being managed by a foreign company, Fiat, which gained operational control as part of the bankruptcy.

2. Dell
Dell did as much as any American company to popularize the PC. Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) was founded in 1984 by one of the group of young tech entrepreneurs which included Bill Gates of Microsoft, Steve Jobs of Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), Jerry Yang of Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO),  Sergey Brin of Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Scott McNealy of Sun. In 1998, Dell had a market cap of $80 billion and Michael Dell was the youngest CEO ever to run a company in the Fortune 500. Dell helped revolutionize the PC industry in 1996 when it began selling computers online. Dell’s business fell apart from 2006 to 2007 largely because it did not create more innovative products beyond fairly standard PC development and the creation of a global retail network of stores. Hewlett Packard took Dell’s lead in PC market share. Dell’s reputation with the public was severely damaged by several federal investigations into its business practices and allegations that the company sold faulty computers even though some of its employees knew about the flaws.

3. Kmart
Kmart was the Wal-Mart of America before Wal-Mart existed. Its predecessor Kresge was founded in 1897. By the mid-20th century the chain began a period when it was one of the most successful retailers in the US by sales and the number of stores it operated. Kmart also grew through diversification and the acquisition of several major brands during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.  These included The Sports Authority, Borders, Office Max, Payless Drugs, and Waldenbooks.  Kmart failed to make investments in the modernization of its stores which in many cases appeared run down. Kmart declared bankruptcy in 2002 and soon merged with Sears. The original American discount powerhouse had been damaged almost beyond comparison by poor management, too much diversification, and competition with Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) which had taken Kmart’s place.

4. Firestone
Firestone, founded in 1900, was one of the first tire companies in the world.  Firestone became the exclusive provider of tires for the Ford Motor Company NYSE: F).  The first winner of the Indianapolis 500 in 1911 used Firestone tires.  Every auto that won the race from 1920 to 1966 ran on Firestone.  The company was a large provider of munitions to the US government in WWII.  “Where ever wheels are rolling, the name that’s known is Firestone” is one of the most famous slogans in American advertising history.  By the middle of the last century Firestone had established its place as the number two tire producer, just behind Goodyear.  A series of accidents caused by defects in the company’s products led to lawsuits and penalties.  These events triggered financial difficulties forcing the sale of Firestone to Japanese tire giant, Bridgestone.  Since then, the American division of Bridgestone has been known as Bridgestone Firestone.  However, the original American brand has been de-emphasized over the last decade.

5. Time Magazine

Time Magazine, founded in 1923 by two Yale graduates, became the largest news magazine in the world.  Time had editions in almost every country in the world.  Its circulation was 4.2 million in the late 1990s. Time’s Person of the Year Award was one of the most anticipated news events annually. Time also had one of the largest international editorial bureau systems in the history of the magazine industry. Now Time’s paid circulation has decreased to 3.25 million.  News magazines in general suffered from periodicity in the world of instant news. Former rival US News no longer publishes regularly. Newsweek was sold to a new owner for $1 last year. Time’s brand was harmed by competition from 24 hour cable television news channels and then internet news websites that are accessible at no cost.

Skype went down for the better part of day earlier this week. Twitter is famous for its “fail whale” service problems. Facebook has the most stable platform to accommodate its subscribers 24×7, but the challenges of maintaining thousands, if not tens of thousand of servers is incredibly complex, and there are weaknesses in the world wide web itself.

There is a vocal minority of scientists who believe the Internet will become so overloaded with traffic that it will have large outages, or may even collapse in some parts of the world. This analysis is fueled by the fact that there are not only more people on the Internet each year. Video sites like YouTube and data sharing services which work on the “cloud” have begun to put an unsustainable amount of stress on the global Internet infrastructure. The creation of more “backbone” by telecom, cable, and governments has been too slow to allow the world wide web to operate seamlessly. Private sector online carriers may not be willing to invest in “pipe” as quickly as they have before. Expansion had become expensive, often ranging into the billions of dollars.

Facebook has come to dominate its market so thoroughly that is has no competition. Its user base is nearly 600 million. Its valuation is as high as $20 billion. Twitter also has no real rival. It has nearly 200 million users. Skype has some VoIP completion, but none have the global infrastructure and large number of customers to really challenge the Internet telephone company.

If Skype can essentially collapse for a day or more, then there is a chance that any of the largest Web 2.0 giants may face upcoming overload problems. Their primacy intact, each of the companies has as its only rival as the reliability of its own technology and the fragility of the Internet.

Douglas A. McIntyre

SpendingPulse reports online retail sales are up 15.4% (Reuters)

Global stocks had their best December performance in a decade. (Reuters)

Skype is still not working for 20% of its customers. (Reuters)

Samsung will make system chips for Toshiba. (Reuters)

Wal-Mart Stores (NYSE: WMT) has made a large investment in the largest online seller of electronics and communication equipment in China–360buy. (Reuters)

Bentana Gold rejected a buyout offer from Batista. (Reuters)

Municipalities have started to raise property taxes to cover the retirement costs of their employees. (WSJ)

Some large US companies have begun to hire again. (WSJ)

Apollo Management will buy $2.8 billion in distressed commercial real estate loans from Credit Suisse for $1.2 billion. (WSJ)

Online specialty stores are leading e-commerce sales higher. (WSJ)

Boeing (NYSE: BA) begun new test flights of its 787 Dreamliner. (WSJ)

Ireland will nationalize Allied Irish Banks. (WSJ)

Administration officials cannot agree on the futures of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and how they might play a larger role in the economic recovery (WSJ)

GE will take a Q4 charge to finish its cleanup of the Hudson River. (WSJ)

Exxon Mobil (NYSE: XOM) has added to its natural gas holdings (WSJ)

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has moved aggressively into local advertising. (WSJ)

Sales of Blu-ray products have helped overall DVD sales. (WSJ)

Leonard Green will take Jo-Ann Stores private. (WSJ)

Leslie Seidman was made head of the FASB. (WSJ)

The activation of e-readers may help increase holiday online sales. (NYT)

Sales of jewelry have aided the recovery of retail sales. (NYT)

The value of Facebook and Twitter have soared based on the market which trades small investments in the companies. (FT)

Goldman Sachs Group (NYSE: GS) has tied more of its compensation to long-term goals. (FT)

France’s AAA rating was confirmed by S&P. (Bloomberg)

Douglas A. McIntyre

The real news from the data, however, was that Facebook is on its way to becoming the No.1 site in the US based on unique visitors. The top spot is now held by Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO). It had 181 million unique visitors for the period. That was followed by Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) at 179 million, and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) sites which had 176 million.

Facebook’s number, which put it in the No.4 spot, was 152 million unique visitors. That figure has grown at a rate of more than 25% for the last two years. That would bring it into the top spot sometime in the middle of next year.

Raw numbers do not mean much in the rankings. Google gets most money from its pageviews from search. Yahoo! gets a great deal of its money from display ads.

The growth in Facebook’s popularity has begun to give it a great deal more power, however. It currently services over 25% of all the online display ads in the US. Facebook charges less for these ads than its major competitors, which has driven down rates at sites like Yahoo! at a time when they can least afford it.

Online advertisers are tapping in to the power of social networks. The millions of people on Facebook can recommend products and services to their friends.  That means Facebooks’s influence in the e-commerce market will grow even stronger.

Facebook becoming the top website may do more to being down the revenue of other large Internet media companies than years of competition among themselves and the recession ever did.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Hulu has had a number of problems recently and traffic to the site only puts these other problems into context. The premium video site began to offer a pay-based service. It appears to have faltered perhaps because there is so much free content at other video sites. Hulu says it plans an IPO, but there is not much news about that any more.

The market has began to figure out that two sites with large amounts of video content are great threats to Hulu. Neither YouTube nor Facebook carry much premium video now, but each has begun a push into the market.

YouTube’s size is extraordinary. comScore reports that the site had 146 million unique visitors in November. These visitors accounted for 5.2 billion viewing sessions. YouTube only needs to get a relatively small number of its users to convert to the premium services it has begun to offer to eclipse any efforts by Hulu. Analysts argue that YouTube cannot convert its users from amateur video viewing to feature-length content consumption. There is evidence otherwise. YouTube viewers spent an average of 271 minutes on the site in November. That is a far higher figure than for any other site in the top ten.

Hulu has a similar competitor in Facebook. The social network had 42 million visitors in November which accounted for 144 million viewing sessions.

Hulu’s strategy has not worked. It was based on its ability to get premium content from networks and movie studios. Hulu’s audience, it turns out, is probably not large enough to support a paid service . YouTube and Facebook have large enough user bases so in their cases that many not be true.

Hulu management never thought that video sharing sites with their poor quality content and amateur contributors could compete with it. The sizes of Facebook and YouTube  will probably prove that wrong. They are huge enough to support large numbers of visitors to high-end video.

Douglas A . McIntyre

Google workers leave for several reasons. The first is that they can. Many of the search company’s early employees have made millions if not tens of millions of dollars from stock options. Google’s stock is not longer rising rapidly. That means options may be worth much less than they were just three years ago. So, many of these deserters believe that they can make another fortune at another enterprise.

Another reason employees quit is that Google is no longer considered the primary large innovative company in the tech world. A recovered economy means that the best new firms have access to capital. What they often lack is enough world class talent to grow rapidly.

Also, Google employees sometimes believe that they will be largely free of the bureaucracy that is always part of a huge corporation which is no longer growing quickly and has more than 20,000 employees.

Google will have to go well beyond the small bonuses that will be distributed at year-end along with salary increases. Many Google workers can increase their compensation much more than that by moving.

Google starts new enterprises or buys them on a regular basis. It spent $1.6 billion to buy 20 companies in the first three quarters of 2010. It is currently in talks, press reports say, to buy Groupon for $2.5 billion.  And, the search company can afford to expand through more acquisitions. It has more than $30 billion in cash.

Google has also started a number of successful enterprises in house. The most outstanding one recently may be the Android mobile OS which has overtaken Apple’s mobile operating system in US market share.

If Google wants to retain its best people, it will have to do something revolutionary. Google’s habit of innovation will need to spread to the way it treats its employees. Google will need to give out more than stock options. It will need to give the people who work on critical software or important businesses an equity stake in those businesses or shadow equity. It will need to do the same with strategic acquisitions. The idea is not new. It is not unusual for large firms to buy out smaller ones and allow founders and employees to keep an equity position which they can retain or which can be bought out later by the acquiring entity.

The New York Times recently wrote “Part of Google’s problem is that the best engineers are often the ones with the most entrepreneurial thirst. Google loaded up on that type in its early hiring.” The same is true when it bought firms like On2 and SocialDeck. Generous pay packages have very limited attraction. Ownership may be a much stronger magnet.

Google can still consolidate revenue from the companies if the amount of equity owned by key workers is relatively small. And Google has very limited options to keep its best people. It has to go down a different path than the one it has followed since its stock moved well over $700 a share two years ago, and its workforce base got so big that even the best people can be lost in the shuffle.

Douglas A. McIntyre

comScore expected online sales to rise 12% this year. However, according to Coremetrics’ Third Annual Black Friday Benchmark Report, “Online sales were up a healthy 15.9 percent, with consumers pushing the average order value (AOV) up from $170.19 to $190.80  for an increase of 12.1 percent.”

Luxury Goods Make a Comeback: Jewelry retailers reported a 17.6 percent increase in sales. These affluent shoppers appear very willing to open their wallets.

Surgical Shopping: Consumers know what they want and where to get it. People are viewing 18.0 percent fewer products on sites than they did last year, suggesting that they are shopping with a specific item in mind and quickly moving on.

Social Shopping: Consumers appear increasingly savvy about their favorite brands’ social presence, and are turning to their networks on social sites for information about deals and inventory levels. While the percentage of visitors arriving from social network sites is fairly small relative to all online visitors—nearly 1 percent—it is gaining momentum, with Facebook dominating the space.

Aside from the unexpected surge, the data show just how much Facebook has changed the world of e-commerce. It now carries one-quarter of all online display ad space, and these units are sold at a sharp discount to the amount charged by the three major online portals and other large sites. The low cost of Facebook advertising likely pressuring display spending across the internet.

Facebook now is becoming a major influence on holiday sales as its tens of millions of members share information about products and deals with one another.

This may be the first retail season in which social media begins to take away some of the power of large online e-commerce sites such as Amazon.com where shoppers go for both purchases and opinions about gifts.

Douglas A. McIntyre