The report examines social shopper needs, ultimately developing six shopper archetypes. By breaking down traits associated with indulgent needs, impulsive needs, utilitarian needs and informational needs, the researchers identified the following (from light social shoppers to heavy users):

The more sustainability professionals use social media outside of work, the more likely they’ll be to experiment with social channels and platforms for sustainability communications. But choosing the hottest new channel or biggest network is no guarantee of social media success.

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.

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.

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.

As predicted, Pinterest has proved itself a formidable presence in the f-commerce arena following figures showing it’s the fastest growing social media traffic source for e-commerce websites in terms of revenue.

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.

We’ve taken up this question a few times now here at SMI: should the boss be Tweeting? And the answer always comes with the phrase “it depends…” as in, it depends, is the CEO a sociopath? or, it depends, is the CEO a fictional figure? If you check these boxes, it’s best to keep the boss far away from Twitter or any social media channel. But here’s fresh evidence that should serve as added incentive for organizations to groom the next boss from the ranks of lucid Tweeters.

We saw earlier this month some of the clearest signs yet that marketers have shed their reservations for investing in social media, committing to upping the spend in the coming year. Now, a new study shows that the most social-savvy companies are using social engagement to expand marketshare, generate more sales leads and more efficiently hone their marketing message.