Social Media Marketing

InterACT! Virtual Conference & Expo, produced by Target Marketing and Printing Impressions, proudly announces the opening keynote titled Get Bold! Creating a Social Business Agenda, to be presented by Sandy Carter, vice president, social business evangelism and sales at IBM Corporation.

Ball Automotive Group (BAG), an automotive dealership based in San Diego, wanted a new and fun way to drive foot traffic into its dealerships. Citing Mashable's 2010 Omnicom survey, BAG noted that 75 percent of likes on Facebook come from some form of advertising and 20 million people like a brand page each day. With this information in hand, the company launched an out-of-home campaign to capture some of this market.

RadioShack began posting its weekly ad circular to its Facebook page last week as a means to engage younger consumers, the company said. RadioShack worked with technology firm PointRoll in developing and executing the “RadioShack Weekly Ad” Facebook app.

Self-proclaimed "Spam King" Sanford Wallace turned himself in to the FBI for allegedly compromising half-a-million Facebook accounts and flooding their owners with junk email. Wallace returns to face 11 counts of fraud, intentional damage to protected computers and — potentially the charges with the longest-term impact — criminal contempt for violating more than a decade's worth of court orders to stay off social networking sites and stop sending junk email, spyware and phishing scams to consumers.

Facebook has gotten pretty good at filtering garbage out of people's news feeds. Too good, as far as advertisers are concerned: They want the garbage put back, so they can spam people, and logically Facebook is complying.

Facebook has bought Push Pop Press, the digital book company formed by former Apple staff. In a statement on its website, Push Pop Press said: “We’re taking our publishing technology and everything we’ve learned and are setting off to help design the world’s largest book, Facebook.”

New York City-based apparel retailer Aéropostale has launched a fully integrated Facebook store powered by Usablenet’s technology platform that combines shopping and social media and extends full e-commerce functionality to the Aéropostale Facebook community.

Sears has driven new traffic to its brick-and-mortar locations by partnering with SCVNGR, a social gaming and check-in service. Here's how the partnership works: While in a Sears store, consumers can pull out their smartphone, launch the SCVNGR app and check in to the Sears location they're currently at. These consumers then create a profile and begin participating in various challenges. For example, Sears' fitness and footwear department's challenge reads: "Tread Softly: Make yourself at home in the shoe aisle and find the coolest tread. Snap a photo and then caption it with where you want to leave your mark in the world!"

Cross-channel retailers must focus on acquiring more social visitors this holiday season, as their value to brands is undeniable. According to the IBM Coremetrics Fourth Annual Online Retail Holiday Readiness Report, social media users are more than twice as likely than the overall population to convert into customers.

With the growth of F-commerce, commerceonfacebook.com has officially launched a free business directory enabling vendors of Facebook stores and third-party service companies to list their businesses.