Telecomms giant Sony Ericsson has teamed up with marketing agency Iris to offer Australian Facebookers the chance to bag themselves an Xperia arc smartphone. To do so, they must try to ‘unlock’ the arc featured on the brand’s new Facebook application, ‘Unlock Xperia’ – very much like sitting in the pub with a friend’s phone, trying to guess their phone password.

Coca-Cola has ranked at or near the top in just about every measure of social engagement for some time now. It is the Lady Gaga of brands. How does it manage to keep its 34 million-plus fans sated on a daily basis? An interesting new piece of research offers some insights.

Before you can start conversing with social media, you need to know what people are saying and how your organization or brand fits into that conversation. Here’s a quick guide to get you started on the very first step: listening.

Turns out the Japanese are blog-addicted, with the average blog visitor there spending more than one hour a month perusing others’ posts. It got us thinking about other interesting national social media consumption habits that just might tell us a bit more about these cultures.

Social media monitoring will evolve towards real-time data-driven business improvement based on socialising customer insight within the firm as a whole, not just within marketing and outbound communications.

Last week we looked at the novel way in which PayPal UK has recruited over 100,000 160,000 Facebook fans and another 11,000 Twitter followers in a matter of a few weeks simply by dangling the chance to win a free iPad 2 to anyone who clicks the “Like” button. We calculated the cost-per-acquisition for PayPal UK is pennies on the pound, a huge bargain when you consider what it costs to lure in new Twitter followers by paying for a targeted “Promoted Account” buy.

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.

One of the most crowded fields of social enterprise software — social media monitoring — just got more cut-throat with Salesforce.com entering the market in the form of a $326 million buyout of Radian6 earlier today. Has the great social media measurement shakeout finally begun?

In October, we noticed an interesting trend forming: social media, and in particular, Facebook, over the first half of 2010 was driving the UK’s resurgent online ad market. New numbers are in this morning and the story hasn’t changed: the social media ad spend grew at a staggering 200% rate last year to help the online display ad sector nearly crack the £1 billion mark.

With global stock markets ping-ponging back and forth these days over political instability in North Africa and the Middle East, escalating food prices and a near-nuclear meltdown in Japan we cannot resist adding yet another variable to the stock-watching puzzle: a company’s online popularity.