A ranking of the City’s most social savvy firms was released this morning and the results may very well surprise you. (They certainly surprised us.) Carnival, the embattled cruise ship line, Burberry, BP, Marks & Spencer and ARM Holdings scored in the top five of the FTSE 100 Social Media Index.

As winter creeps into many parts of the world, men everywhere must steel themselves for the debilitating seasonal condition that affects an alarming number of them every year: Man Flu.

Once upon a time, charities looking to raise colossal sums of money quickly would turn to fundraising kingpins like Elton John or Bob Geldof, who would round up their rich and famous musical pals and encourage the general populous to congregate in a city park, get drunk and wave at the cameras beaming the event live into millions of homes around the country. But what about now?

Greenpeace is up against the bad boys again, this time with the help of an online campaign that, in a break from the past, is mysterious and stealthy. For now.

There’s a lot of fuss around the promise of social commerce, and, in particular, F-commerce. But brands are only just beginning to see the potential of using the world’s most popular social network to sell product.

We share 27 million pieces of content every day, a new study says, and that number is increasing everyday. But what types of content are consumers more likely to share? It’s a question top-of-mind for big brands and organizations investing in social media outreach. Here’s a hint.

While much has been made of how social media is changing consumer behavior, advertisers are struggling to keep up with and make sense of this shiny new toy. Matthew Goldman is the executive director of product management for subscription ad products at ATT Interactive (parent of YellowPages.com). Goldman is ATTi’s point man on social strategies for its advertisers.

We’re a bit surprised today to learn (a few days late) about the demise of Viewzi, a nifty tool to visualize search that was launched in 2008 by Austin-based entrepreneur Brandon Cotter and died just after Christmas.

Shoppers in the U.S. have set an impressive five single-day online sales records this Christmas season as total sales through Dec. 10 ticks upward to just under $22 billion, a 12% year-on-year increase. Good, but not great. At this rate, online retailers will not reach the ambitious $32 billion e-Christmas sales forecast set earlier this year.

Companies plan to invest more in social media next year, a new Econsultancy survey shows. That’s the promising bit. The less inspiring part? Not all of these companies actually know how they are going to track this investment. This comes even as a new report shows how one aspect of social media spend – a Facebook strategy – really does have a pay-off.