It’s official: the International Olympic Committee now has a Foursquare page, adding a badge to go with its aggressively trademark-protected rings. It’s picked up an impressive 14,500 followers in just a few hours, proving that even the tradition-bound dinosaurs at the IOC can eventually come around to the social+mobile+local draw of an international sporting event. There’s hope for other similarly skeptical organizations.

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?

This is one of those questions that admittedly is being asked in just a handful of companies these days. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be a pressing question for brands, publishers and organizations of all stripes who seek to reach a global audience on the device they prefer. A new forecast on tablet sales may just accelerate the conversation at the board level.

Smartphone users are, en masse, expected to download more than 32 billion applications and games this year, generating revenues of more than $26 billion. That’s good for a staggering 30% year-on-year growth rate and it’s bound to be good news for content publishers and games makers. But there’s a sector that appears to be even more bullish: mobile advertisers.

2012 was supposed to be the year of social commerce. Expectations grew immense as mega retail brands such as Target, The Gap and Ticketmaster opened up shop on Facebook, home to now 850 million users. Even big-time management consultants had an opinion as they talked of the “Facebook effect” on retail. Booz & Co. calculated the global take from social commerce will grow six-fold to $30 billion by 2015. We captured much of the rapid rise and bullishness of the nascent sector in our “History of F-Commerce” infographic.

The Obama Administration in Washington has passed a series of consumer protections for web consumers that looks eerily European: something closer to an opt-in regime that calls for greater transparency on how user data is used and a do-not-track-option.

The biggest social media hiring coups of 2012 so far goes to Kraft Foods which managed to lure B. Bonin Bough, former head of social media at PepsiCo, away from cola giant. Bough, who was the face behind PepsiCo’s enormously successful Refresh Project, is expected to run digital comms/marketing at the food giant which is going through a big shakeup itself this year as the company splits into two parts. Bough has plenty of experience championing digital and social within a massive organization as he told us two years ago at our SMI 2010 conference.

There is plenty of promise and reason for pause when it comes to social commerce, predicted to be the fastest-growing segment of online retail. But the rush to throw up a storefront on Facebook or Twitter is not for the ill-prepared, as Richard Downs of Infosys Europe tells us.

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.

We’ve just put the wrap on Social Media Influence 2011, our annual conference in which we bring together the top brands, thinkers and practitioners in the world of social business to discuss the big issues impacting the market today and what to expect tomorrow. The event drew speakers from Google, Dell, Unilever, LivingSocial, Orange, O2, Infosys, Viadeo and many more. Here’s some of the highlights and the first batch of photos too.