Over the past few months, Old Spice has captured the hearts of millions through a viral video campaign that combined the reach of TV commercials and now the personalization of social media. Could the hunky …

Seven out of ten retailers have already implemented or plan to implement the Facebook Like button into their websites, concludes a new survey by SeeWhy Research. But taking a closer look at online retailers, the ground-zero for next-generation social shopping, it seems like the biggest retailers are merely paying lip service to “Like.”

Long abandoned marketing campaigns and defunct products are still visible across much of Facebook, turning the social network into an eerie graveyard of yesterday’s brilliant marketing ideas gone stale. We look here at the most visible ones, and offer a suggestion or two on how to clean them up.

How do you keep track of the hundreds, even thousands, of daily discussions involving your brand? Focus on the conversations that matter, says PepsiCo’s head of digital and social media, B. Bonin Bough. From this discourse, you will gain invaluable insight into how consumers truly feel about you.

Like the coffee fiends we are, we are anxiously pressing the refresh button on the Starbucks Facebook page as it nears an unprecedented milestone for a consumer brand: the first to 10 million fans.

Domino’s Pizza UK is attributing its 13% sales increase in the first half of 2010 in no small part to its social media prowess, specifically its integration with Foursquare’s location-based promotion system. But, as we know, correlation doesn’t necessarily equal causation. But the boast does have the web world buzzing: can a big social media push boost online sales so quickly?

Our man in Madrid (at least this weekend for the finals) has compiled the final installment of SMI’s analysis of World Cup 2010 sponsors. Each week of the tournament we look at which of the sponsors are up and which are down from a social media perspective. And the big winner is….

Is Twitter adding a new pay-for-followers scheme to boost sagging brands and would-be celebs? What about a new real-time analytics tool to make sense of up-to-the-minute conversation streams?

The Daily Mail last month may have been late to the Fake Steve Jobs Twitter ruse, but it got us wondering: is there anything real corporate chiefs can learn from their fake counterparts?

We were lucky to be able to call upon the expertise and insight of a number of top social media thinkers at this year’s Social Media Influence conference. Adam Brown was one such expert.