Turns out the Japanese are blog-addicted, with the average blog visitor there spending more than one hour a month perusing others’ posts. It got us thinking about other interesting national social media consumption habits that just might tell us a bit more about these cultures.

Despite its reputation as a money-hungry corporation, Ticketmaster has been working to bring users a more customer-friendly company, and its latest social media offering seems to tick everyone’s boxes.

Society’s penchant for serious time-wasting has never been more apparent than at a point two years ago, when, seemingly overnight, people woke up to inboxes stuffed full of requests for fertilizer and crops, all in the name of virtual farming. Instead of partaking in something useful like, well, actual farming, over 80 million people became so enraptured by the gaming phenomenon of Farmville that support groups and addiction advice pages started springing up all over the place.

Facebook fatigue is hardly a new term. By our count, it first emerged over three years ago, back when Facebook had a user base in the tens of millions, when tech pundits wondered whether the social network’s monster growth run was stalling. While that proved to be far from true, today a new bit of research suggests there’s a worrying fall-off in activity from Facebook’s core audience: recent college grads.

With more social media screw ups than points scored, it’s no surprise many coaches and managers ban their players from Twitter and Facebook. Oklahoma State University, however, is using these online platforms in a ground-breaking way.

America’s Deep South is no stranger to typecasting, and fast food sandwich chain Subway has capitalized on this beer-swilling, ho-down, redneck stereotype to promote its new Smokin’ BBQ Chicken Temptation Sub. And it’s taking the message to its social media channels.

eCommerce solution providers Zibaba have teamed up with Shopify to allow users to seamlessly create Facebook stores with full shopping functionality – and it’s just the beginning of the F-commerce revolution.

It may just be that the Newsfeed, and not the fanpage, is the most valuable real estate on Facebook for marketers. So says new research jointly produced by Facebook and comScore that shows Facebook users are 40-150 more times more likely to consume branded content in the Newsfeed than they are by going to the fanpage. And, thanks to the power of the Newsfeed there’s a new way to calculate your potential social media reach.

So says Publicis Modem UK in a forward-looking Slideshare presentation that covers what the new social network is about and what impact it will have on digital business. The more interesting question might be: will Google+ become a lynchpin of your business strategy?

We’ve had a very positive response from our History of F-Commerce Infographic published last week and a number of you have asked if we could re-package it as a Slideshare presentation. Here it is in PowerPoint format.