As the Jerry Sandusky child-molestation trial dominates the news, teen-centric social-networking virtual world Habbo Hotel has shut down the ability for its 250 million users to communicate with one another as a recent news broadcast has it that a reporter posing as a child was left open for sexual invitations, according to Brand Republic.

Of course, that’s something the site — "the world's largest social game and online community for teenagers," which we described two years ago as a "parent-free zone for kids to hang out and goof off" — is surely looking to fix quickly since what’s the point of a social-networking site if you can’t communicate with other users?

Not helping Habbo is that the explosive report by the UK’s Channel 4 — which found sexually explicit chat rooms and users as young as nine, despite the site's rule that it's for teens — prompted British retailers Tesco, WH Smith and GAME to stop selling Habbo gift cards and European venture-capital firm Balderton Capital (Habbo's main investor) to yank its stake in Finnish parent company Sulake, according to CNET.Continue reading...

Macy’s, Sephora, Lancôme, and Michael Kors are ranked as Facebook “Geniuses” in the second annual L2 Facebook IQ Index, the New York-based luxury think tank that measures the aptitude of 100 luxury and prestige brands across Beauty, Fashion, Specialty Retail, and Watches & Jewelry.

The study, conducted in partnership with Buddy Media, ranks brand efforts across four criteria: Size & Growth, Engagement, Programming, and Integration, and each brand was scored against over 350 qualitative and quantitative data points, and assigned a Facebook IQ ranking of Genius, Gifted, Average, Challenged, or Feeble (a description we'd quibble with, by the way).

The rest of the top ten prestige brands in L2's new Facebook index? The envelope, please...Continue reading...

Web analysis firm comScore and Facebook have released their second, highly anticipated report, The Power of Like 2: How Social Marketing Works. Their top-line conclusion: exposure to earned media and paid ads on Facebook drives “behavioral lifts in purchase behavior.”

The study comes at a crucial time fo Facebook, which needs to boost its ad business to dispel the post-IPO naysayers. Despite comScore's research indicating that ads really do work on Facebook, prompting Ford to increase its Facebook ad spending with a pre-Father's Day campaign, the fall-out from GM's decision to stop Facebook advertising because they're not convinced it's effective continues to roil the marketing waters.

“While marketers understand the importance of a channel that now accounts for one in every seven minutes spent online, many are challenged to quantify its effectiveness,” commented Andrew Lipsman, comScore VP of Industry Analysis, about the new study.Continue reading...

On Twitter, the brand currently defining conventions of digital conversation, the source remains the strongest factor in value and quality and trust trumps emotion. New research shows the key factor in predicting a tweet's popularity is the source of the link being tweeted. And just as in search engine optimization, recognizable (brand) names help.

A just-released study from UCLA and Hewlett-Packard's HP Labs researched four factors and their influence on optimizing tweeted headlines and news links with accuracy 84% of the time:

• The credibility of the news source that generates and posts an article

• The category of news the article falls under (sports, technology, health)

• The subjectivity of the language in the article

• Famous people, brands or other notable entities mentioned.

The data was collected from Feedzilla’s API over nine days and 40,000 news articles, and popularity of articles was measured as the number of times a news URL was posted on Twitter. Using Stanford's Named Entity Recognizer to identify a famous person or company and measure prominence relative to others resulted in a score for each of those 40,000 articles based on the four factors.Continue reading...

Applebee’s is not only a neighborly restaurant brand, but it's virtually friendly, too, chatting away on Twitter and Facebook to connect with customers. Now it's purporting to parlay its social media savvy with a tongue-in-cheek campaign. “Life Is Better Shared” is a series of social media tutorials, riffing on our obsession with living life online and scoring a wacky, humorous, double-play. 

The main message being proffered across multiple channels including YouTube, Tumblr, Twitter, and Pinterest is “to promote Applebee’s as the number one spot in America for women to enjoy a much needed girls night out – any night of the week,” with an Applebee’s Girls Night Out Goddess as hostess. Grab your BFF’s and 'enjoy delicious food and tasty drinks.'"

The secondary message:  “While sharing online is rad, sometimes life is better shared offline. A little more face time and a little less Facebook can do the soul some good. That’s what this campaign is all about - spending time offline at Applebee’s with your BFF’s. Talking without the use of abbreviations. Actually laughing out loud instead of just LOLing. Sharing those dirty little secrets with your besties you would never share with your entire social network.” And, of course, ordering entrees and apps to share with those besties over girl's night out drinks at Applebee's, right?Continue reading...

Twitter has seemingly invaded pretty much every last bit of our culture and now another holdout has fallen by the wayside. The Ladies Professional Golf Association has embraced the social-media site fully and, as of the tournament that started Wednesday, has caddies wearing bibs that feature their golfer’s Twitter addresses prominently.

The LPGA, its players, and its tournaments currently have about 1.2 million Twitter followers combined, according to USA Today. There are 93 of the LPGA’s 119 players in this week’s Wegman LPGA Championship and each of them will surely gain a few Twitter followers before the tourney comes to an end on Sunday.Continue reading...

As promised last month, Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning's Airtime has gone live, with the tagline "Create shared experiences with the people you know, and the people you want to know." The social video chat service from Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker is officially on the air, launching at a New York press conference with Jim Carrey, Julia-Louis Dreyfus, Ed Helms, Joe McHale, Jimmy Fallon, Olivia Munn, Alicia Keys and Snoop Dogg in attendance.Continue reading...

As Facebook’s social and financial currency slips post-IPO debacle, the company is wasting no time in making its next headline-grabbing move, technology for children younger than 13 years old to use the social-networking site under parental supervision.

The move would open a cornucopia of new revenue streams and a Pandora’s box of privacy concerns by adding an entire new cohort to its 900 million users worldwide. Facebook's current policy bans children younger than 13, but 2011 research from Consumer Reports found 7.5 million people younger than 13 use the site, including more than five million under the age of 10. Microsoft's researchers also found that nearly one-third of 11-year-olds and more than half of 12-year-olds use Facebook with their parents' knowledge.

Among the options being tested is connecting children's accounts to their parents' for supervision of ‘friending’ and apps, and targeting the fast-growing game market for teens and tweens. Nearly 12% of Facebook's $3.7 billion in 2011 revenue came from games like Zynga’s Farmville.Continue reading...