Social networks may be all the rage with consumers, but some media operators remain uncertain and downright fearful that syndicating content to the sites will turn them into mere “organ donors”.

One such exec asked Facebook’s UK commercial director Blake Chandlee, at the FT Digital Media & Broadcasting Conference in London today, what sort of assurances social sites could give to content owners wary of taking their content off-site.

But Chandlee, didn’t have any words of wisdom. While partners’ “brand presence is important to [Facebook]”, the former student network says the onus is now on partners to carefully consider how they wanted to interact with their consumers. Chandlee said moving from creating advertiser microsites to Facebook Ads, which lets advertisers and media owners set up their own brand profiles, has shifted responsibility for brand integrity from Facebook to partners themselves.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s digital producer Monique Potts told us: “It’s very challenging finding the balance between distributing your content and maintaining brand integrity. They need content to bring people to their networks, but we want people to come to our sites, not send them to theirs.”

MTV Networks (NYSE: VIA) legal counsel Pam Claridge added that media owners must be careful with social networks because consumers see them as “holistic, intimate and casual”. They would revolt if they saw them “hijacked by corporations”, she warned. MTV distributes its content on Bebo’s OpenMedia platform. 

Still, Potts says she doesn’t blame Facebook for their hands-off attitude. “I can understand, from their point of view, that they don’t want to manage hundreds of microsites and brands.” But she added:  “Social networking is still enough of a novelty now where they don’t necessarily need content to bring in users, but that will change and the time will come when the novelty passes and they’re going to need us.”

Separately today, countering last week’s Nielsen Online figures that prompted several “Facebook fatigue” newspaper stories, the network said its active user count rose from December’s 7.7 million to 8.3 million in January. Nielsen had said the unique user count fell five percent from 8.9 million to 8.5 million in that period. The difference - Facebook’s preferred “active users” metric measures only those who used the site in the last 30 days. Via MW.