Forget spending hours in front of reality TV shows, car insurance price comparison site Confused.com is on a mission to compile the UK’s best talents in bite-size five second clips with its new social media campaign.

A billion dollars for a 13-person app-making startup that’s never made a dime? That’s the headline head-scratcher coming out of yesterday’s blockbuster acquisition of the super-popular photo-sharing app Instagram by Facebook. But take a closer look at the numbers and you see what Facebook gets out of it: a global, mobile powerhouse.

The evidence is becoming hard to ignore: we’ve seen video and social become a driving force in the growth of digital advertising, highlighted again by this morning’s IAB numbers and last week’s landmark study on ad effectiveness. Combined, social+video represents a £443 million market in the UK alone. It’s no surprise then that New York-based Buddy Media announced today a new social marketing integration deal with YouTube.

Your teenage nephew’s homemade videos may not win an award for creativity, or even clarity, but don’t dismiss the power of these amateur auteurs. A new ad effectiveness study shows that user-generated videos more than pull their weight when compared to the pros. They even drive sales.

It’s been just over two weeks since the aptly named, under-the-radar NGO Invisible Children released to YouTube a classic piece of agitprop video, KONY2012. And what a two weeks! The video has been viewed more than 100 million times and Invisible Children have been lauded for their actions in shining a spotlight on the atrocities carried out in central Africa by Joseph Kony, leader of the Lords Resistance Army. At the same time the very success of KONY2012 has shone an equally bright spotlight on both the finances of Invisible Children and the factual accuracy of the video.

The publication yesterday of the bombshell “Why I left Goldman Sachs” resignation letter left company brass in New York completely unprepared for the global fire storm of chatter that it’s stirred. To be sure, Goldman, a notoriously anti-social company, has taken a huge hit to its reputation – not to mention a $2.2 billion haircut off its market cap – that will be tough to buff clean any time soon.

We came across an interesting infographic that details one of the burning questions on the lips of all digital marketers: who exactly are these Pinterest phans? What do they do? What do they earn? And how is that they have made this network the fastest-growing out of the gate?

Unless you’ve been camped out in a deep, dark jungle (that doesn’t border Uganda) you now know the Internet this week has crowned a new viral video king, a “king” that features child-enslaving warlord Joseph Kony. It’s the most viral viral ever!, Mashable declares in a headline that’s sure to stay atop Google for months – or until somebody knocks off Kony. Who could that be? We have someone we’d like to nominate.

British Gas is looking after your most vulnerable neighbors, an initiative that’s not just noble, it’s gotten the social web buzzing about a big-hearted utility. Yes, you heard right, big-hearted utility.

How creative can you be in 5.9 seconds? To put that in perspective, it’s probably taken you that long to read this far. A mere shaving off six seconds, it’s the 0-60 time for the new 328i 3 Series, and it’s also the length of the videos being submitted to BMW’s Facebook page, where fans can win their very own model