Late last month we cited the latest IAB UK statistics to point out that the social media ad spend — the fastest growing in all of digital — last year grew a staggering 200% to top £132 million in Britain. We have some new projections for the U.S. market and the growth in social spending is even greater.

No more standing in line for the bathroom at the annual sprawling music festival. Wrigley 5 Gum launched a Twitter promoted tweet this past weekend to direct fans to the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival’s live broadcast on YouTube. The “ChoachellaLive” YouTube stream might be the most advanced integration of social media into live music and sponsorship to date.

This is so brilliant, we’re a bit dumbstruck it didn’t happen sooner. ETrade’s loveable toddler trader spokesperson (the message being it’s so easy to trade online with ETrade that a… right, you got it) is the victim of a spoof ad in which he starts trading in, quite naturally, toxic assets and loses EVERYTHING.

Nobody saw this one coming. Flip video, the darling gadget of mobile journos and digi-documentarians, is dead, shut down by its under-pressure owner Cisco. We are morbidly fascinated here with the death of brands in this era of social networking. The death of Flip is the spookiest we’ve yet seen.

President Barack Obama kicked off his 2012 re-election campaign last week on — where else? — Twitter and Facebook signifying the continued importance of social media in the U.S. presidential elections. Obama has plenty of Facebook and Twitter followers ready to back his campaign a second time around. But where the Obama Facebook account works as a source of inspiration for digitally minded politicians, the Obama campaign this time round falls well short of the rousing “Yes we can!” spirit we’ve seen from his camp in the past.

Last week we noted the “Facebook effect” on digital advertising after it was reported the social network likely contributed £3 out of every £4 spent on social media marketing in the UK last year. Today, we see the “Facebook effect” holds true for retail too.

Last week we reported on the two-headed force of social media and online video propelling advertisers in the UK to a record spend for 2010. While we wait for the audited US online ad spend numbers to come out in the coming weeks, here’s further evidence of the importance of online video to the marketing world.

Google launched +1 [on March 30], basically its answer to Facebook’s Like button. When you click on a ‘+1′ icon displayed on a URL, it shows up in Google search results when you are signed in. And if you have social connections within the Google empire (e.g., Gmail contacts) you will see which of your connections has +1?d the URL. While I am digesting the possibilities I thought it might be helpful to summarize some initial reads on the +1:

A Bit Lucky is a social gaming developer best known for its Facebook game Lucky Train, which is a social town simulator that has nearly 1 million monthly active users.

In October, we noticed an interesting trend forming: social media, and in particular, Facebook, over the first half of 2010 was driving the UK’s resurgent online ad market. New numbers are in this morning and the story hasn’t changed: the social media ad spend grew at a staggering 200% rate last year to help the online display ad sector nearly crack the £1 billion mark.