Cider brand Magners has become the first drinks company in the UK to sell its products directly through Facebook, offering a limited run of 1,000 gift packs priced at £10 each.

Ah, the road trip. Is there an activity more symbolic of fun and freedom than piling into a car with your favorite people and taking off to an unknown destination, listening to great tunes along the way? Hardly, and so Nissan has tapped into the psyche of road trip adventurers for a social media campaign promoting its new 2012 Versa sedan.

Billed as an ‘Instagram for shoppers’, new social commerce iPhone app Snapette is proving a huge success with fashionistas around the world.

A new game – one that allows players to take control of the destiny of an online environment – has launched, which has a direct and positive benefit to the real world. Trash Tycoon, a green-themed game for Facebook from social gaming startup Guerillapps, lets users manage and upcycle a town’s waste, while raising money for real-world projects that reduce carbon emissions.

For some, their local barista is a lifeline into a busy day, and when a big tip and a beaming ‘thank you’ just isn’t enough, there’s new iPhone app We&Co.

With continual talk of billions of dollars floating around the social commerce sphere, it’s easy to imagine the dollar signs flashing in the eyes of investors and entrepreneurs alike. However, a pleasing break from the money-focused merry-go-round was launched this week in the form of Farmigo

It’s not often that Nature weighs in on innovations in social media – let alone the much maligned field of sentiment analysis software – so when I saw this headline I had to take a closer look: “News mining might have predicted Arab Spring.”

Credit card company American Express has launched its first social-media specific campaign, which sees it donate money to UK charity The Prince’s Trust for every ‘inspiration’ users share on Facebook or Twitter. However, revelations point to a decidedly uninspiring reality.

Web security pros at Sophos have found a worrying security hole that impacts all Facebook fan pages. The upshot? You, the page creator, could wake up some day to find you’ve been booted off as admin of the site.

We’ve just updated our “Social Media Screw Ups – a History” research with a series of new cringeworthy corporate gaffes from the past year that include insights into how they occurred and how they could be avoided in the future.