That’s how you could pretty much sum up the conversation I had this morning with Jon Bishop, head of social media for PayPal UK. For the second time in a year, the popular online payment service has amassed 6-digit gains in its Facebook following in a matter of days with a pretty cost-effective pitch: friend us and you’ll get a chance to win a new iPad 2.

Some 42% of online shoppers recently polled “have ‘followed’ a retailer proactively through Facebook, Twitter or a retailer’s blog, and the average person follows about six retailers.” This, according to a Shop.org study on the growth of social commerce. But what’s their motivation in liking/friending/following a retail brand?

As I type, the LinkedIn (LNKD for you day-traders out there) IPO still has yet to open for its inaugural day of trading and already tech and finance journalists are buzzing about what this will mean for investors, every-day business managers and the entire social media IPO pipeline, some of it silly speculation, some of it precious nuggets of insights.

Online commerce is one of the few bright spots in retail, once again showing it’s the fastest growing segment in the sector. And what’s the fastest growing part of online commerce? It’s a two-part answer: social- and mobile-commerce, new studies once again show.

For a good 500 years, spanning the 12th to 17th centuries, the Republic of Venice was the world power of maritime trade, with an influence that spanned Europe, Africa and the Far East. Its influence today is greatly reduced, but it’s still a fitting venue to discuss the future of the digital economy as we’ve been doing at the Digital Economy Forum.

We’re actually being slightly conservative here, given the new data from comScore. Incredibly, Facebook served up about one in every three online display ads served in the U.S. And that was just for Q1, a seasonally slow quarter.

To be sure, marketers aren’t the best equipped in an organization to talk publicly about death and loss. (That’s the job of the PR pros, apparently.) But surely the occasional product recall, discontinued programme or goof-up are inevitable discussion topics that will arise in any community. Social media communities are no different.

Nobody saw this one coming. Flip video, the darling gadget of mobile journos and digi-documentarians, is dead, shut down by its under-pressure owner Cisco. We are morbidly fascinated here with the death of brands in this era of social networking. The death of Flip is the spookiest we’ve yet seen.

We’ve given a fair bit of attention here to Google’s new algorithm changes, which reward high-quality sites while punishing the so-called content farms that cut and paste what’s in the news. Last night, Google unveiled the second and final (for now) phase of the “high quality” roll-out that will impact all English-language searches around the world. For anybody who publishes content to the web, the changes are BIG.

Last week we noted the “Facebook effect” on digital advertising after it was reported the social network likely contributed £3 out of every £4 spent on social media marketing in the UK last year. Today, we see the “Facebook effect” holds true for retail too.