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.

To call it a “hole” makes it sound like some code glitch, or something incredibly technical that might be discovered by super-smart hackers. Not so. This is more a flaw in the way fan pages are set up these days. If you, as the admin, give the keys to others to help manage the page, one of them could simply remove your admin rights as simply as removing an unwanted post. This, despite the fact that Facebook’s TOS says can’t be done. Now you may be thinking who would do such a sinister thing to lock me out of my own page? Well, all these get-fan-quick service for starters, as Sophos’s Graham Cluley suggests. Gulp.

Here’s their take on how this happens:

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So far, there’s no response from Facebook, but TheNextWeb points out that this is all by design. Facebook, it reports, changed the feature in June so that newbies could in fact boot off the original owner.

As we wrote at the time, there are many reasons why a company or brand may want to change the ‘owner’ of Facebook fan page, for example staff turnover means that any number of people may need to ‘own’ a page , or if the Page was created by a third-party consultant or creative agency, ownership will need to be passed back to the company at some point.

Indeed, many people complained when this functionality wasn’t in place. If a Facebook page was created by one person, why couldn’t ownership be transferred and synced to another email address?

Yes, there are plenty of times when you’d want the creator out of there. But without telling them? Why not offer a simple email verification system? That could go a long way toward removing admin abuse.

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.

We caught up with Richard, the Business Director at Infosys Europe, on the sidelines of Social Media Influence 2011 a few weeks back where he told us about the new reality retailers must live up to in an age where consumers can use the same forum to discuss your product in depth, warts and all, before making a purchase decision.

Editor’s Note: Did you miss SMI 2011? No worries. The videos and presentations can be accessed here.

The ROI debate still hangs over every social media budgeting discussion, it seems, but the camp of believers is growing larger and more impressive every day. One such believer is Unilever’s Selina Sykes, who handles digital and social media marketing for Lynx, the UK’s top-selling deodorant brand for men.

Sykes spoke with SMI’s Brian Skepys on the sidelines of the Social Media Influence 2011 conference recently telling him that digital is framing the brand’s entire marketing strategy. Have a listen:

Editor’s Note: Did you miss SMI 2011? No worries. The videos and presentations can be accessed here.

There’s a lot of fuss around the promise of social commerce, and, in particular, F-commerce. But brands are only just beginning to see the potential of using the world’s most popular social network to sell product.

SMI’s Brian Skepys caught up with Alex Pearmain, head of social media at O2, on the sidelines of our annual conference to find out how one of the UK’s biggest consumer brands is handling the delicate transition of turning its fan page into a sales platform.

Editor’s Note: Did you miss SMI 2011? No worries. The videos and presentations can be accessed here.

Remember all those predictions last decade that we’d be able to use our mobile phone to buy petrol or cab fare, or pizza? Alas, those soothesayers forgot to mention it would be a feature of everyday life in Scandinavia or South Korea, but for the rest of us – too bad. Well, we’re getting a bit closer to this day now that PizzaExpress has teamed with PayPal UK on a new iPhone app that allows you to go one better: you can pay your bill and book a table at a nearby location. Okay, the “freebie” part is a limited time offer for those who download the app by 3 July.

PayPal is hailing this as a big breakthrough for the popular online payment system as it gives it a new, hugely important platform/market with which it can process payments: the world’s tens of million of smartphone users.

PayPal UK tells us how it works:

From the sounds of it, PizzaExpress could be the first of many high street brands teaming with PayPal for a co-branded payment app. “Over a million UK PayPal customers have made a payment on their handset so combining our payments experience with PizzaExpress’s ground breaking app should be a perfect combination, ” says Cameron McLean, General Manager, Merchant Services at PayPal. “The line between the high street and the online world is blurring, and innovative brands like PizzaExpress recognise that payment by mobile makes a great service even better.”

Marketers have to be pretty clever or pretty bold to gain attention during Super Bowl week, particularly if you’re not advertising in the big game. Two years ago, Peta (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) took the latter position forcefully by getting its ad – featuring models humping vegetables in the name of supporting the vegan lifestyle – banned by broadcaster NBC. Peta is back this year dangling no-excuses out-takes of what appears to be the same shoot, this time keeping it to the web.

Dubbed the “Veggie Love” Super Bowl casting session, the video was posted to the official Peta YouTube channel yesterday where it’s collecting a little over 1,000 oohs and ahhs. (To be honest, it’s getting less attention than we figured for something that fits squarely in the soft porn category. That might have something to do with it being embedded elsewhere around the web.) In any event, we were tempted to slap an NSFW label on this, but only because it is insultingly unimaginative. Judge for yourself:

What’s more laudable though is Peta’s approach to social media-inspired cause-related marketing. It has a 1 million-plus following on Facebook and it uses the forum to lecture, cajole and point out little factoids that we may have missed from the mainstream news such as the top item of the Facebook Wall today:

Yeah, good luck getting through to the Department of State’s Egypt division today. Still, the Peta Facebook community is wildly appreciative of the post. I suppose this shouldn’t surprise me. Few causes move the online public more than helping animals. (Just take a look at how many Pepsi Refresh grant winners will be cashing their checks to shelter abandoned pets). And it may not be imaginative, but a little skin the first week of February is a sure-fire way to get you noticed. After all, we’re writing about it.

How much budget are the most pioneering firms allocating to social media? According to a new survey of corporate communications and marketing specialists, anywhere from 5-15% of the “overall external communications budgets” is being earmarked for social. It’s better than the sums we saw just two years ago, but how exactly is that supposed to cover costs on a year-round “holistic” communications strategy?

Here are some highlights to the survey, conducted by FedEx and Ketchum Pleon:

• Communications departments still dictate social media strategy; marketing jumps in when it comes to product promotion.
• Focus of social media implementation is still on external comms, though more interest in internal.
• 40% of respondents say they’ve configured their intranets with social features; 50% intend to.
• 10% of companies surveyed are considered “leaders;” 75% = “followers” and 15% = “observers”.

Greenpeace is stalking another corporate baddy, using Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to amass a virtual resistance effort of 600,000-strong to pressure the polluter to cease-and-desist its carbon-consuming ways. Numbers-wise, this may be Greenpeace’s most successful social media pressure campaign yet. The problem is its target: the extremely like-able Facebook.

The issue, as Greenpeace tells us in this cheeky animated video below, is Facebook’s reliance on dirty coal to power its massive data centers.

As clever as the video is (it’s retrieved already over 52,000 “Likes” since being posted to YouTube and Facebook in mid-September), it’s no doubt not going to do much to get Facebook to rethink its new data centers plan as long as the green-minded critics number in the mere hundreds of thousands.

How do we know this?

This is the second time Greenpeace has gone after Facebook this year. In February, Greenpeace teamed up with Change.org in a pressure campaign aimed at getting Facebook to drop its “dirty coal” data center in Oregon. The result? Not very successful as Facebook is now planning to build a second, larger data center in North Carolina to handle all the Likes and Pokes and Friend Requests and Location Check-ins that a half-billion users generate every day. How is that one powered? Yep, coal.

Learn more about social media and sustainability with The Social Media Sustainability Index: an analysis of how nearly 300 major corporations are communicating sustainability and CSR through social media.

Our friends at Do the Green Thing today have launched a noble new idea: a drive to use social media (and all media, really) to get us to donate a bit of clothing that once may have meant a lot to us, but now is sitting in the back of a drawer, the colors fading along with the memories of why you bought it.

As they explain, “it’s part of Green Thing’s mission to use creative inspiration to turn green living from something you ought to do to something that people want to do – so innovation and design have been deployed at every stage of the Saved cycle. Including packaging lovingly saved from waste that can be reused with a freepost label to send back your T-shirt to be Saved for somebody else.”

SMI interviewed founder Andy Hobsbawm in June on the sidelines of Social Media Influence 2010. Here’s what he had to say about using social media to motivate, inspire and rally the public to do worthy things.

Surely, they fade into the ether, never to be heard from or seen again. Not so for the Old Spice “I’m on a horse” spot. It may have fallen off Advertising Age’s “Viral Chart” late last month, but it’s getting new life from impersonators: Sesame Street’s Grover and the Blendtec guys.

In the summer, we wrote about how Old Spice was seeing a surge of fans to its social media channels thanks to the popularity of the brand’s viral video campaign featuring “the man your man could smell like.” More impressively, the popularity of the videos corresponded with a surge in sales. Can the “Will it Blend?” team and Grover of Sesame Street fame once again earn Old Spice a new viral success? We leave you here with the videos: