It’s official: the International Olympic Committee now has a Foursquare page, adding a badge to go with its aggressively trademark-protected rings. It’s picked up an impressive 14,500 followers in just a few hours, proving that even the tradition-bound IOC can eventually come around to the  social+mobile+local draw of an international sporting event. There’s hope for other similarly skeptical organizations.

I’m being a bit harsh as I remember full well when the dinosaurs roaming the IOC lakeside HQ in Lausanne, Switzerland wanted nothing to do with mobile technology, dot-com journalists and the like. That was back in 2000 during the Sydney Summer Games. Fast-forward 12 years and the London Games are being called the first-ever “Social media Olympics.” As part of the preparations, the IOC this year has launched a new social media hub that aggregates social media conversations by and about the athletes taking part in the London Games.

This isn’t the first time Foursquare has played such a big role in a major sporting event. Last year, it was chosen by the NFL to create a virtual Super Bowl party in an effort to take the appeal of the American-dominated sporting event to a global audience. No small feat, but it did an admirable job.

With the Olympics, the task should be a much easier assignment. It helps that the IOC is dangling free tickets to one lucky follower. Here’s how it works, Foursquare explains on its blog.

The Summer Olympics hit London in less than ten weeks and the International Olympic Committee wants to reward the foursquare community with a trip to London 2012! All you have to do is get out and celebrate Olympic Day (June 23) by playing sports, in the spirit of the Olympics. Here are the two simple steps to your chance to win:

• Follow the IOC on foursquare.
• Check in twice before June 25 when you play sports or exercise to unlock the Olympic Day badge. Checking in at any two athletic sites will work (think yoga studios, beaches, gyms, tracks, stadiums, or hiking trails!). The lucky winner will be sent to London to check out the Games.

The IOC has obviously been following closely the boom in smartphone – and in particular, mobile gaming – usage, which has really taken off impressively even since the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver. As we noted last month, there are now more than 46 million avid “gadget” gamers in Western Europe, and Britons, this year’s hosts, leads the league table by a surprising margin.

Editor’s Note: Got Olympics fever? Then put on your calendar June 12th in London. Hear Alex Balfour, head of new media at London 2012, deliver a keynote presentation at this year’s Social Media Influence conference.

As part of a comprehensive global survey of forward-looking business leadership, IBM spoke to 1,700 CEOs from 60 countries, in 18 industry sectors, and found two somewhat surprisingly impactful conclusions about the future of social. The first is that social media engagement with customers will soon be more important than face-to-face interaction. The second, as a result, CEOs aim to significantly escalate their level of social media engagement with customers over the next five years.

This survey though comes with a big BUT. While CEOs see the power of social engagement, they are less bullish on social media’s influence on customer decisions. Specifically, 45% of CEOs polled said social media was one of the three most important customer channels now, but only 10% said it would be in 3-5 years time.

The IBM study drills down further into where CEOs in the UK and Ireland feel lie the potential and obstacles in their business as we shift to a more social world. The upshot? UK and Ireland companies need a better understanding of their customers to help forge closer connections and stronger relationships.

• UK and Ireland CEOs see customer relationships and human capital as the most important drivers of sustained business success (63% said these factors were key drivers of sustained economic value)
• Customers are seen as the most important part of businesses to invest in understanding better according to 75% of UK and Ireland CEOs

On innovation and partnenrship working as an essential source of development and growth:

• For the first time, UK and Ireland CEOs identify technology as the most important external force impacting their organisations – even more than shifting economic and market conditions (76% said technology was one of the most important factors, against 63% for macroeconomic factors)
• UK and Ireland CEOs value business partnerships more than their global peers;  47% rate business partnership networks as an important source of economic value compared to the global average of 28%
• 84% of UK and Ireland CEOs plan extensive external partnerships over the next five years vs. a figure of 69% globally

Here’s an infographic that sums much of this up:

How confusing can the advertising picture on Facebook get? You know all about General Motor’s $10 million pull-out last week. That move, and the dud underwhelming Facebook IPO, prompted WPP chief Martin Sorrell to declare on Friday that Facebook is “one of the most powerful branding mechanisms in the world, but it’s not an advertising mechanism.” Fast-forward to this week and WPP’s Group M ad-buying unit has struck an extensive licensing deal with Buddy Media to “make it easier for clients to spend money there.” Confused?

Well, it shouldn’t be all that confusing if you know the short, but eventful history between Sorrell, WPP and social ad-serving specialists Buddy Media. WPP was an early investor in Buddy Media, dating back to 2010. And, despite Sorrell’s current misgivings about Facebook, his agencies are looking to double in 2012 their Facebook ad buy outlay for clients from $200 million to $400 million. With so much money on the line, it’s good to have a little skin in the game, the thinking goes.

This is isn’t the first time WPP and Buddy Media got together on the business side. Back in February, Buddy Media acquired London-based Brighter Option, a Facebook ad serving specialist, and on the same day it announced Brighter Option’s social ad management software would be used to power Facebook ads for WPP’s 24/7 Real Media clients worldwide.

This time round, WPP’s GroupM has selected the company’s BuyBuddy social ad product as “its preferred social ad management partner” to place and track ads placed on Facebook and other social networking sites. The deal doesn’t end there. In addition to rolling out Buddy Media’s BuyBuddy to its agencies – including Maxus, MEC, MediaCom, Mindshare, M80 and others – GroupM will “also begin training on how to maximize the benefits of Buddy Media’s unified social marketing software solution across paid, owned and earned media.”

But where does this leave the future of Facebook marketing? Will it be the GM model where big brands maintain a vibrant fanpage presence, but little else. In other words, is Facebook an “earned” media channel or can you get some return on a display ad buy here?

Buddy Media’s CEO Michael Lazerow has an interesting view. He says that the earned element (content) + paid element (ads) work together. Here’s how he explained it to Ad Age:

Every ad that you run starts as a post to your Facebook page…You post to your page and then buy the distribution of that post. They are tied together. Our bet with this is that a publishing system and an advertising system on social has to be together.

Editorial Note: If you want to hear more about the future of social media marketing, join us for Social Media Influence 2012. Buddy Media’s Luca Benini, MD of Buddy Media Europe, will speaking on this very topic.

Forget the hours on the couch following your favorite reality TV shows, car insurance price comparison site Confused.com is on a mission to compile the UK’s best talents in bite-size, five second clips with its new social media campaign.

To promote the brand’s new QuickQuote text message service, the ‘5 Second Challenge’ asks users to upload five-second video clips of themselves strutting their stuff onto YouTube, then either emailing or tweeting (with #5secondchallenge) the URL to Confused.com. The videos will then be entered into a YouTube slam which will run from Wednesday 23 May until Monday 28 May. The public will be encouraged to vote for their favorite, and the winner will scoop a cool £500. Not bad for five seconds of work.

Sharon Flaherty, Head of Content at Confused.com, said: ‘We are encouraging people to vote for their favourite video in our 5 Second Challenge on YouTube slam. To see the video of their choice rise up through the leader board, viewers simply need to vote for their favourites. We are hoping to find out what else the British public can do.’

To get the ball rolling, staff at Confused.com have uploaded their own videos; from inhaling jello, to reciting the alphabet at lightning speed, to mimicking a worm, their clips show that really, anything goes.

The contest is not an entirely new concept. Back in February BMW’s ‘0 to Desir3’ campaign saw users uploading 5.9-second long video clips showcasing their creativity in the hopes of winning a car. Its great success means it’s little surprise the model has been emulated, of course. Indeed, Confused.com itself is creating a lot of buzz about the campaign on Twitter. Though, judging by the slow trickle of results ticking in from the #5secondchallenge hashtag, it appears the UK public is still rehearsing (for now).

This confuses us a bit. Giving users the opportunity to show the world their talents without facing the wrath of Simon Cowell, what’s not to like?

The traffic-driving impact of The Big 3 social networks – today, let’s rank them as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest – is being constantly measured, calibrated, then re-measured and re-calibrated, it seems. This is important as marketers want to know on which networks it would be wisest to maintain a vibrant presence. The answer: all three. But it’s clear that one of these Big 3 is not just driving traffic, but big-ticket sales. Hint: it ends with “interest.”

The latest data come from social commerce platform enablers at Shopify. Shopify analyzed traffic data from over 25,000 Shopify online stores and drew the following interesting conclusions. It writes on its blog:

…referral traffic from Pinterest to Shopify stores is equal to traffic coming from Twitter. Of that traffic, shoppers are 10% more likely to make a purchase compared to those who arrive from other social sites. Furthermore, of those purchases, the average order is $80 which is double the average order from Facebook. Pinterest has already become a huge player in the world of ecommerce.

Here’s the breakdown in, yep, infographic format:

As we write, the world is playing countdown to the biggest tech IPO in a decade. In a matter of hours, we’ll know how many billions (north of $100 billion) will add up to the value of Facebook. As we ponder all those zeros, here’s an interesting infographic on the 901 million-pound gorilla’s globe-spanning growth.

The infographic is courtesy of the social media data junkies at Socialbakers. It’s called “Think Global. Act Global: How big brands are taking Facebook marketing to the next level.”  As the name implies, it shows the emergent markets that will dictate the Facebook growth story over the next year, something marketers investors will be keen to follow. Of course, it comes just as we continue to debate whether it was a smart move or not for General Motors to pull all upcoming ad purchases on Facebook. A look at the global reach figures below and you have to think GM will be pulling an about-face in the months to come.

For some time now we’ve been delivering to SMI readers a “Social Media by the Numbers” roundup, a summary of the big numbers and the big picture that are driving social.  Our newsletter subscribers know this well as they get it in their in-box at the start of every week. It’s proved so popular we thought it would be a nice idea to give you a longer version this morning. Enjoy!

Again, the biggest take-away for you is this: If you find this kind of numbers-driven reportage of value, why not subscribe to the SMI newsletter where you’ll get these timely updates sent straight to you at the start of each week?

Let’s get started:

1.5 million – the number of fans who voted in a crowdsourced effort to build the perfect burger in a new social media campaign by McDonald’s Germany. There is a lot on the line. It’s being called ‘McDonald’s first crowdsourced burger.’

60% – of the shoppers who boast about a new Fendi or Prada or Burberry (or, insert luxury label here), 60% prefer to do so on Facebook. The full infographic on luxury brands can be found here.

33% – the number of companies using video this year to engage with customers and built thought-leadership cred. Video is at least as popular as display and pay-per-clicks advertising, and now more popular than commissioning white papers, the research found.

4,292 to zero – This may be the most impressive Tweets-to-follower ratio of all: Goldman Sachs’ Twitter channel has attracted this many followers despite not posting a single Tweet. Ever. Probably the first order of business then for the Wall Street giant’s future social media community manager.

61.94% – This is the percentage of quarter-on-quarter growth Ford Mustang saw on its Facebook page at the end of Q1, the same quarter the new Facebook Timeline went into effect. Why the jump? Check out the full story on how the auto sector is driving engagement in the new pic-friendly world of Facebook fan pages.

40% – The percentage of Twitter users who regularly patrol Tweet streams in search of products or services. This figure we plucked from an interesting infographic describing the future of the social customer.

46.4 million – the number of Western Europeans who use their smartphone for gaming, up an impressive 50% year-on-year. The Brits and Italians lead the league table.

£20 – Here’s a social commerce campaign worth noting: UK grocer Hello Fresh dangled £20 worth of “coupon” discounts last week to its Facebook fans and scored an impressive bump in engagement.

20% – For you data junkies, this figure represents the “average conversion rate” some retailers are seeing thanks to the new Facebook Timeline.

$1.7 billion – the size of the in-app advertising market, thanks the the explosion in apps and game downloads. In-app ad revenue in North America and Western Europe has more than doubled year-on-year. The full outlook for the mobile media market can be found here.

75% – of online purchase intentions are never fulfilled. Why? One big reason is the hassle of having to register. Here’s a fascinating piece of analysis that looks at why social log-ins could propel online commerce to a new level.

62% – of Fortune 500 companies maintain an active Twitter presence, new research shows. This is up from 60% in the year prior, 2010. Retailers top the Twitter-savvy list. The industry at the bottom may surprise you: telecommunications. To see where your sector lands check out the full research.

… and here’s a bonus number for you:

12 – as in June 12th, the date of Social Media Influence 2012. Here’s the link to learn more about the event‘s impressive speaker list and how to register.

The two biggest stories in digital right now are Facebook… and Facebook. On the eve of an IPO that could value Facebook at $100 billion we get word that automotive giant General Motors is pulling its $10 million Facebook ad budget on account of diminished returns. Is GM telling us something, that Facebook is a waste of money as a marketing opportunity? The answer: not so fast.

Firstly, we should get something clear. GM is not abandoning Facebook. It will keep its fanpages for GM and for its various brands such as Chevy Camaro and Cadillac alive. And, it will continue to invest in a social media team to keep them current, fresh and engaging. Community management doesn’t come cheap, marketers! It just won’t be paying Facebook (in the form of display ads) to drive extra traffic to these pages, nor off Facebook to its suite of brand or corporate sites.

To be sure, its decision to pull display ads from the world’s largest social network appears to be an indictment of Facebook as a marketing tool, but what it clearly is is a reassessment of its digital ad-buying priorities. GM might figure, heck, we’ve got 6 million-plus fans on our network of brand pages whom we can reach every day for free, why pay? After GM’s surprise move, you might be thinking the same thing. Let me explain then why it would be unwise to “pull a GM.”

1. Abandon a good thing at your peril.

Facebook is the world’s biggest ever media property with 901 million active users; 500 million of them log on daily to interact with their networks. That’s unprecedented potential reach and frequency. Plus, Facebook skews higher in all the relevant categories: its users are younger, wealthier and better educated. No wonder than that 89% of ad agencies in the U.S. plan to spend their social ad bucks with Facebook.

2. We’re only just beginning to see the true potential here.

A recent study showed that click-through rates for Facebook display ads were up 18% year-on-year in 2011. Not bad in an otherwise tough economic climate. Automotive isn’t the best-performing category, it should be noted, but it’s still in positive territory, as this study from TBG Digital shows.

Also to consider: the addition of Sponsored Stories and the new Facebook Timeline earlier this year are also boosting engagement rates and will do so for some time to come.

3. It’s where your competitors are…and where they are beating you.

As we’ve said recently, engagement is the new Holy Grail for digital marketers. Conversations beget conversions, which beget sales. No single sector is performing better in the fan engagement category than automotive. Why are the car-makers doing so well? The auto brands are good story-tellers. They produce some of the best creative, and their products hold immense interest for the public. Always have. (If only an FMCG marketer, pushing a brand of cleaning product or stock cooking cubes, had it so easy). But that’s not all. Auto brands do a better job of getting the consumer involved. Just think what Ford has done with the Focus, and, more recently, Chevrolet’s multi-channel effort around the Super Bowl this year.

One brand that is lagging here is General Motors. A quick glance of the auto leader board on Facebook, and you can see that GM and its brands land just four in the top 50, one of the worst performances of all auto brands. Who are the brands doing the best? The ones who can keep fans engaged with fresh content.

It should be noted, that not all of those in the Top 5 are prolific Facebook display-ad buyers. Certainly, Ferrari isn’t. It clearly gets by thanks to an avid fan base of drooling Ferrari fans.

But GM doesn’t have such a fan base. Never has. It needs to build excitement on Facebook (and elsewhere) for its models otherwise it will sink in to irrelevance.I predict it will be back on Facebook, perhaps as soon as next year’s auto shows.

Over the past 12 months, social media has gone from an “add-on” to “business critical” for marketers in the UK. Social has opened up a huge opportunity for brands to engage directly with customers, and every marketer understands now that there are clear benefits to using social media for marketing. But, as online engagement platform provider EPiServer noted in a recent study, the vast majority of UK businesses still struggle to effectively measure their return on social media investment. Here then are five keys to increasing your social media ROI.

How fast is social media uptake happening among UK companies? Consider these statistics from a recent EPiServer survey polling 250 UK-based marketers: greater than 3 in four (77%) of marketers surveyed are running an online community, or plan to in the next 12 months. Over one-third (35%) of companies have been actively using social media channels to engage with the public. These findings suggest that the early adopters are well established, but best-practice is still a difficult code to crack within most organizations. How then do you ensure you are getting the right message to the right audience via the right social channel in the most cost and time efficient way?

Consider these five points all marketers should implement as they put together their next social media campaign:

1. Use a single tool to measure multiple, segmented social media platforms
There are many social media platforms out there, from the big players like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to newcomers like Google+, Pinterest and Quora. Unless you have unlimited budget and content at hand, you’ll need to segment your platforms to prioritise where to put your efforts in. You need to use different platforms for different things, and segment your content accordingly to achieve optimal results. Mix in three, four or five platforms and you’re talking about a lot of time and effort, especially if you’re managing each platform individually. That’s why it makes sense to use a single tool to manage all your campaigns.

2. Manage content effectively with smart CMS
Great social media campaigns rely on great content that’s personalised for the audience you want to reach, and the platform you want to reach them on. For effective ROI you need your content to work harder for you. Managing unstructured content is a massive issue for marketing teams and web managers, let alone repurposing it, deploying in different ways across different social media platforms and keeping control of who (access rights, anyone) can distribute which content in which platform. Save time and money by extending your existing CMS to cover the content you deploy to social media site. It will also help you respond quicker and be more relevant to your target audience.

3. Make best use of people and time for optimal results
It’s a misconception that social media is “free” marketing. The true costs involved are in the time spent developing, managing and repurposing content, and time spent monitoring conversations and engaging with various communities. This requires that you have a good understanding of how “socially” mature your organization is, both at a corporate level and also among individual employees too. Moving everyone up the social media maturity curve from monitoring and push, to reach and engagement, will help deliver better results, but will also pose new challenges.

4. Measure campaign performance across individual channels
One of the biggest challenges with using multiple social media platforms is measuring how your campaigns perform across them all. Even the most basic metrics will differ from platform to platform: likes and shares, mentions and retweets. Measuring all of this is incredibly difficult and time-consuming if you are doing it separately for each platform. Linking your social platform to your own site analytics in one place will help you deliver faster reporting and actionable insights to improve your campaign.

5. Find and use the tools best suited for your organization
Using one tool to manage your website and your activity on social media platforms is simpler, less expensive and more effective than trying to master and integrate many different ones. If you can extend your website CMS to cover third party social media platforms you will benefit from a single interface and give yourself more time on doing the valuable stuff: developing content, engaging with customers and generating leads.

For more on these five points, and other insights on how to better drive traffic and achieve an enhanced social media ROI, download EPiServer’s latest ebook on the subject here.

EPiServer is an advertising partner of SMI.

As increasing numbers of major brands exhaust the basics of a social networking presence, more and more are turning to social crowdsourcing as an innovative way to engage their customer base.

We’ve seen Nissan launch a comprehensive crowdsourced car-building campaign, American beer brand Sam Adams crowdsource a new draft beer via Facebook, and makeup maestros Bobbi Brown bring back old lipstick shade favorites based on crowdsourced feedback. Now, the universally-recognised McDonald’s is tapping into social crowdsourcing success, with its Germany-centric ‘Mein Burger’ (My Burger) campaign.

Here, users built their own burger using a smart online application, choosing every detail from bread and sauces to meats and cheese. “We gave them the tools, they created the buzz,” says the accompanying review video, and create a buzz they did. After creating their dream burgers, users were encouraged to use the application’s poster, video and banner tools to generate noise about their tasty inventions and get votes from the German public. By the fifth week of the campaign, a burger was being created every 26 seconds (yep, even after five weeks), and 1.5 million people had voted for the burger they deemed worthy of the title of ‘McDonald’s First Crowdsourced Burger’.

The winning burger – the Pretzelnator – is topped with ham, American and Italian cheese and comes in a pretzel-like bun, and is now being served in McDonald’s restaurants around Germany for a limited time.

According to the video, the campaign not only reached one in four German online users, but one in four Germans overall, thanks to the hype generated within the traditional media, too. This led to an impressive seven million page impressions, heralding the campaign as the brand’s ‘most successful ever’. And the best part? The whole thing cost McDonald’s nothing; its fans did all the hard work.

“Never before has a campaign at McDonald’s brought so many additional customers, served more promotional burgers or, for that matter, earned more total revenue,” the video announces. Indeed, if campaigns across the board continue in this vein, many marketers may very well find themselves out of a job.