Decided to drop the ‘Friday’ tag as I keep missing the Friday deadline, it would seem! Here are the picks for this week.

1.    Will It Blend? – iPad – Blendtec

It would have been easy to go blind with all the iPad reviews over the past week so I thought it would be nice to kick things off this week with a video of one of them getting the blendtec treatment! Happy viewing!

2.    ESPN nabs Premier League mobile highlights rights – Stuart Dredge

Not that exciting for anyone not interested in digital developments in sport, but this one could have some big implications down the line. ESPN have been buying up all kinds of sports broadcast realestate and this week nabbed the rights to show Premier League football and rugby highlights via mobile. This is potentially a big market and an area the clubs should be seriously looking at in the future as devices and connectivity get better…there will be money to be made!

3.    Social Networks are Touchpoints for Customer Acquisition and Retention – Brian Solis

Some good stats here showing how online shoppers are active on social networks and looking to connect with brands if they are going to get some value in terms of interaction and probably a few offers here and there. There is a gap between the consumer activity on the social web and the number of brands providing a meaningful connection with them.

4.  The Problem With Conversational Marketing – Jason Falls

A good one from Jason Falls looking at the challenges of marketing ‘correctly’ through social media – its tough to try and sell someone something on a community platform where the audience doesn’t like salesmen…but does like interaction and buying! As he says, “its fun to explore”.

5.    Report: Corporate Fan Pages Increase Purchase Intent More Than Banners And Widgets – Neil Vidyarthi

Similar to #3 , This one looks at a recent study which indicates that brands allowing fans or customers to connect with them on a social platform, create more purchase intent than common ad formats. Anything that can exercise your customers brains a bit more than passively consuming a banner ad is going to have a positive effect!

6.  6 Ways Brands are Using Social Media For Real-World Action- Daniel Stein

Social media is still being used, by a number of brands and organizations, as a marketing and advertising delivery mechanism. However, there are more and more examples of it being deployed as a means to mobilize a community to take action…in the real world. This post has a look at some of those who are doing it well.

Back to the usual format of six posts for this week. There have been some good and really bad social media stories this week so, without further ado…

1. Nestle mess shows sticky side of Facebook pages – Caroline McCarthy

We could have picked from thousands of posts about Nestle’s Facebook shocker. Read the post for the full story but in a nutshell – Greenpeace attacked Nestle over using palm oil which is causing deforestation and created a spoof kit-kat commercial which went viral. Nestle haters went to Facebook to vent, Nestle weren’t prepared (maybe the understatement of the year!), reverted to old school PR techniques and have taken a royal kicking. Have a read and then let me know what you would do now if you were Nestle?

2. Scaling Social Media – Chris Brogan

Social Media isn’t as expensive as broadcast media…but to be effective it is labour intensive. Here, Chris Brogan gives excellent actionable insights into how an organization can scale social media, from monitoring, customer service, social marketing (nice term, I like it!) and content creation and the approaches needed to be successful. Good stuff, read it!

3. Sports teams, leagues tap SAS Analytics to boost profits – Winnie Palaran

Can social media monitoring help sports teams and leagues sell more tickets, t-shirts and popcorn? Apparently it can! The San Francisco 49ers use data and analysis from social media to improve the overall fan experience and by looking at online content, fan behavior data and demographics, the 49ers can identify season ticket holders at risk of not renewing and send them meaningful offers. Liking that, liking it a lot! Sports teams need to spend as much time understanding their fans as they do their players…something I don’t feel is happening in the UK.

4. The Social / Broadcast Matrix – Scott Gould

An interesting model here from Scott Gould (the dude behind likeminds-link), diagramming the difference between broadcast and social communications…and the bits in between.

5. Times and Sunday Times websites to charge from June – bbc.co.uk

Hardly a surprise but News International have announced they will be charging to access the Times and Sunday Times websites in the summer, £1 for the day or £2 for the week. We will have to see how it plays out but charging for news that you can get for free elsewhere isn’t the safest bet.  People will pay for niche content but not general news…what do you think?

6. A Social Media Scoreboard That Works - Jay Baer

There is a shed load of data off the back of social media programs…or there should be if you are measuring it properly…which you should be if you want to show ROI. Anyway, this tool from swix brings in all your social media metrics into one handy dashboard (except Facebook fan pages…which sucks a bit but you can’t have everything!). Very handy.

Have a great weekend and I will be at Wembley Stadium on Sunday to watch the mighty Southampton take on the world class Carlisle in the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy Final – Jealous?!

There has been a fair amount going on this week in social media with the Social Media World Forum (smwf) on Monday and Tuesday and SXSW the other side of the pond. Due to this, there is a bonus post in our top six this week.

1. Brands Must Become Media to Earn Relevance – Brian Solis

Always on the money in terms of in depth analysis and forward thinking, Brian Solis looks at how brands have to become adept at creating content and actually becoming media. He also breaks down the differences between paid, earned and owned media and looks at how, as content creators, brands and individuals can use social media to build influence and trust within their niche.

2. Social Fans More Likely to Buy – emarketer.com

Who’s looking for some ROI ammo? That’s most of us then! A recent study from Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate (US) indicates that if you are a friend or follower of a brand then you are more likely to buy their stuff. Not exactly a Eureka moment but anyone working with B2C clients, it may be worth throwing pointing them here.

3. 4 Ways the Entertainment Industry is Getting More Social – David A. Yovanno

If you are a fan of something or someone then social media should be your friend. TV companies, Movie studios, bands or labels and especially sports teams or athletes now have the tools to bring their fans into their world like never before. In this guest post by David A. Yovanno on Mashable, he looks at some examples of how the entertainment world is getting its social on.

4. Hats off to Heineken - Molly Flatt

I had originally credited this one to Mashable but a tweet from James Whatley at 1000Heads set me straight on how they had it first! This is one of the best WOM (word of mouth) campaigns I have seen in a while. The video is below so doesn’t need too many words, but note the harnessing of: real life, both genders, online and offline and the human touch. Enjoy.

5. Social Listening for Economists? – Aaron Lewis

Interesting angle from Aaron Lewis on how social media can be used as an economic prediction engine. By using the social media monitoring tools (in this case Crimson Hexagon), a decline in social chatter about job hunting pre-empted a slight increase in overall economic performance in the US. Not sure if we should hang our hats on the data just yet…but I like the way he is thinking!

6. Sequoia’s Kvamme: Social Media Marketing Can Replace Advertising – Liz Gannes

According to Sequoia Capital’s Mark Kvamme, “If you can harness social media marketing, you don’t have to pay for advertising any more.” With so many people now creating their own media, if marketers and advertisers of old can navigate the new waters and find a way in to these communities then they can turbo charge their messages. They are going to need to learn the new languages and etiquette though.

7.  Chat Roulette Funny Piano Improv #1 – PianoChatImprov (Merton)

Controversial, I know but I couldn’t resist throwing in a seventh this week. If you aren’t familiar with chatroulette then go here or here. Then watch the below video and laugh accordingly!

Written on a Friday but posted on a Saturday, here are six posts from around the blogosphere that caught our eye this week. As always, if you have any thoughts on these posts or would like to point us at some of your favourites then let us know in the comments.

1. Remarkable Stats on the State of the Internet [VIDEO] – Jennifer Van Grove

Thought we would start off with a video (made by Jesse Thomas) – mainly because we are too lazy to write the stats out plus we all prefer to watch a video than read on a Friday.

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.

2. The Strategy Trap: Why focusing too much on strategy could be killing your ability to execute – Olivier Blanchard

An excellent post from the Brand Builder on how there is a huge amount of focus on strategy and not enough on implementation which means that the customers never get the experience that was laid out in a strategy. Brands need to plan their social media programs from start to finish and look for additional value propositions outside of talking to customers on Facebook and Twitter in an authentic way.

3. Ten of the World’s Strangest Social Networks – Kristin Burnham

This slideshow of some of the most niche social networks you can think of is, A – fun to look at and B – a good example of how like minds are finding eachother online and defining their own communities. Expect this to continue and for brands to seek them out more and more as a more efficient alternative to the major networks.

4. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Social Media Marketing - John Jantsch

Read the quote in the post by Douglas Adams, it’s a good philosophical thought on the perception of new technologies depending how old you are. A sweeping generalization, yes…but nice none the less!

5. Do websites even matter any more? – MARK W. SCHAEFER

Of course they do. A good post highlighting the need to make use of your ‘homebase’. It is probably possible, for the first time to be engaged with your customers online and not have a website. But the website is still the best place for registrations, transactions and ‘official contact’.

6. 3 Crisis Survival Lessons for the Social Media Age - Dallas Lawrence

There has been a number of high profile brand social media implosions in the last couple of years and this post looks at the new rules for crisis management and response. Walls of silence, advertising your way out of a crisis or being slow to respond are not viable tactics brand protection tactics anymore. Social media loves spreading bad news and people have got each other to get the ‘truth’ from.

There has been a fair amount of Buzz around the social web this week (pun intended). The Superbowl on Sunday and of course the ads, which Google appeared in and Pepsi didn’t, a few social media clangers and Google’s new social offering which is going to rule them all…or maybe not? Anyway, here are our six of the best from this week.

1. Trust in Media Down, Good News for Experts – Valeria Maltoni

The latest Edelman Trust Barometer is out and the world trusts all types of media less than it did last year. TV is down twenty points, print down twelve and even peer recommendations are down twenty points. The reports did find trust in business and government was UP?! I…so I am going to say trust in the Edelman report is down ten points as well. Valeria raises some sound points that agencies and consultants need to get serious about helping organizations who are serious about integrity and communicating that.

2. The horror, the horror: @VodafoneUK’s social media balls up – Chris Lake

So VodafoneUK are the latest to be punk’d by social media as one of their staff posted this little gem , cue corporate panic on an epic scale and frantic @apologising to anyone who commented. Not great by any means but they did jump on the issue quickly and, as Chris, points out in his useful takeaways – Human Error will occur and you only really need to say sorry once.

3. The 4 Pillars Of B2B Marketing-The Lifecycle Of a B2B Campaign – Achim Klor

Good rules and pointers on how to implement a successful B2B marketing campaign. Achim outlines the ‘four pillars’ as Insight, Strategy, Creative, Metrics. Each of these aspects needs to be used to support a campaign either on or offline. Worth a look.

4. Publicity for Roach Motels – Peter Himler

Tripadvisor.com have published the crowdsourced Dirty Hotels list . Not somewhere you would want to be if you are in the hotel game. Easy to game and bad mouth your competition? Apparently not according to the CEO who says the sheer weight of genuine reviews makes it hard for any fake ones to make the cut.

5. New BBC Director Mandates Journalists Use Social Media – Robert Paterson

The new BBC Director of Global News, Peter Horrocks, has mandated that all journos need to get on the social media bandwagon or get on LinkedIn and start looking for jobs. This on the back of Sky News incorporating Twitter more and more and I would expect to see more ‘mainstream broadcasters’ follow suit this year.

6. Web Strategy Matrix: Google Buzz vs Facebook vs MySpace vs Twitter (Feb 2010) – Jeremiah Owyang

We had to get Google Buzz in somewhere this week. While its too early to accurately make calls on Buzz, it looks like Google means business this time. In this post, Jeremiah gives us an interesting analysis matrix of the four social network guerillas comprised of SWOT analysis, and a look into the future. Always good stuff.