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.

Venture capitalists are back, funding privately-held firms in the United States alone to a tune of $5.9 billion in first quarter of 2011.
That’s the highest Q1 rate of investment in start-ups in the past three …

That’s how you could pretty much sum up the conversation I had this morning with Jon Bishop, head of social media for PayPal UK. For the second time in a year, the popular online payment service has amassed 6-digit gains in its Facebook following in a matter of days with a pretty cost-effective pitch: friend us and you’ll get a chance to win a new iPad 2.

I’ve been exploring some of the implications of openness at large scale and identifying how value is created. One way to think about that is by positioning openness and empowerment against control and ownership.

npower Football League launched the ‘Every Shirt Has A Story’ campaign earlier this month to get fans passionate online for a chance to win a range of league prizes just as the season draws to a close. Technically the campaign accomplished its goal, with a respectable number of fans participating in the contest. But in terms of social media engagement, if this campaign came down to a penalty kick, you could say, it was a sour miss. Here’s what went amiss.

PayPal UK launched an effort last week to boost its social media presence through a giveaway contest dangling free iPad 2′s. Its message: love us and we might award you with this must-have baby. Can boosting social followers through bribes be a genuine lure? More importantly, does it work?

As I type, the LinkedIn (LNKD for you day-traders out there) IPO still has yet to open for its inaugural day of trading and already tech and finance journalists are buzzing about what this will mean for investors, every-day business managers and the entire social media IPO pipeline, some of it silly speculation, some of it precious nuggets of insights.

We’re actually being slightly conservative here, given the new data from comScore. Incredibly, Facebook served up about one in every three online display ads served in the U.S. And that was just for Q1, a seasonally slow quarter.

Slim-Fast, of all brands, launched a promoted tweet campaign last week in time to capitalize on all the excitement surrounding the Royal Wedding. Its promoted tweet can hardly be called a precision-based advertising scheme; the tweet was directed at anyone interested in William and Kate, which, as we know from the TV networks, is anybody from urbane Brooklynites to Sydney royalists, plus a lot of people in a certain island in the North Atlantic. Did it work?

Volkswagen gave the driving public the first glimpse at the 2012 VW Beetle last week in a launch spearheaded through social media, most notably, through a prominently placed promoted tweet campaign. But despite the hype around the new design and the well-intended social strategy for the launch, the initial results have sputtered out of the gate.