Hello Fresh delivers exact quantities of specific ingredients direct to customers’ doors, so they can create great-tasting meals themselves, in the comfort of their own homes. Kicking off their Facebook Offers journey was a £20-off deal – pretty generous considering that represents about 50 percent off most of Hello Fresh’s packages

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.

Are you prepared for the seismic shifts of digital/social/mobile transforming the business world, where the referral economy teams with the power of mobile computing to create tomorrow’s winners (and losers) in retail, publishing, marketing, communications, you name it?

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.

Despite the Twitter population giving a general thumbs down to sponsored and promoted tweets with claims that they’re too intrusive, Facebook is following a similar suit with its new Offers feature.

The future of daily deals, those ubiquitous email offers for spa treatments, DJ classes and half-off designer sunglasses, is a bit in doubt these days as consumer complaints mount. But one of the praction’s pioneers, LivingSocial, believes strongly they are here to stay, and has even expanded the idea to introduce the concept of the weekend-long deal with high street giant Boots.