This could be the toughest job yet in social media: running Goldman Sachs’ largely neglected social media communities. That’s right, the world’s most reviled investment bank – a.k.a. “the great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity” – is looking to hire a social media community manager. Interested?

2012 is fast living up to its billing of being the year of Big Data. And it’s getting a bad rap from privacy experts. But does Big Data have to be bad? Here’s how it can be used to make business and society more sustainable.

The visually rich Facebook Timeline has only been around a few months, but it’s already picking up big converts from social-savvy brands who want to invest in deeper engagement. A new infographic from Israel’s Storeya also shows it’s delivering promising ROI for retailers too.

Last month we looked at a promising study that demonstrated how social-savvy businesses were seeing “four times greater business impact” than their less socially engaged peers. That finding masked one not-so-rosy issue that continues to hold back further take-up and investment in social: the difficulty of measuring its ROI. A new piece of research drills down into the UK and finds companies having increasing difficulty calibrating just how far their social investment is going.

“Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans,” said a wise John Lennon, and that was before the dawn of the social media age, which sees us fervently engaging in aspirational living without actually getting out there and doing the things we chat about, or taking ownership of the items we so publicly covet…

A favorite topic of ours here at SMI is tracking the corporate take-up of social media and seeing how some of the world’s largest companies are using the technology to connect with stakeholders inside the organization and beyond. We came across this infographic this morning that pits the Fortune 500, the world’s biggest companies, vs. the world’s fastest growing companies, as represented by the Inc. 500, in terms of social media smarts. Who wins?

The International Olympic Committee has launched a new social media hub that aggregates social media conversations by and about the athletes taking part in this summers London Games.

To illustrate the effect social media is likely to play in global interaction with the games, the IOC also produced this infographic.

Last week we reported on new data showing consumers are increasingly demanding that websites allow them to use their Facebook/Twitter/Google+ social login details and how it is likely to be a major impact in influencing social transactions going forward. Here’s more evidence that handing that the social log-in could very well translate to increased sales, or, at least fewer “shopping cart disruptions.”

A few weeks ago we wrote about the “mission-critical” importance of Tweeting business leaders. Why is that? Put simply, CEOs who communicate freely using social media are held in higher regard – not just by employees, but by customers too, study after study shows. An organization where the boss Tweets is an organization where internal communications is more dynamic and transparent. That then has an impact on external comms, or the brand image portrayed to the public.

If you’re like most of us, you cannot keep track of the varied username/password protocols required to log back into a particular website. Is it the four-digit password or the eight-, you wonder? Is it the alpha-numeric version? Are symbols required? Right. I forget. Send me the change password details to my in-box and I’ll start over. And so the cycle repeats itself again and again. It’s not surprising then that a new piece of research tells us consumers want to do away with this game of guess-the-password in favor of social logins.