Unless you’ve been in a cave this week, it would have been hard to avoid the splendid, amazing and entertaining Old Spice media blitz, which includes brilliant ads and one of the best social media campaigns in the young history of the channel.  As TNW reports, the Old Spice social media team had secretly been collecting people’s – and especially celebrity – questions and responses across Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo Answers, and were preparing for this week’s all-day-video-shoot where Shirtless Old Spice Guy (Isaiah Mustafa) would provide video responses. MORE >>

According to a HubSpot study, 71% of marketers viewed Twitter as a useful marketing tool last year, up from just 39% in 2009. Facebook added more than 200 million users last year, and Twitter more than doubled in size, adding 115 million. ROI remains a contentious issue, but in at least a few areas best practices began to emerge. Discover the answers to these questions and more here in 55 of the best guides to social media strategies, tactics, tools and statistics of the past year. 11 Practical Business Uses for LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter by GigaOM. MORE >>

The best memes become popular organically. The first video in the series debuted in December 2011, however the phenomenon actually began in April 2011 with the @ShitGirlsSay Twitter account. Their series has over 30 million YouTube views, countless parodies, more than 1.5 million followers on Twitter and a book coming out this fall entitled, you guessed it…”S**t Girls Say.”. The best quality about the “S**t Girls Say” videos is that people can watch them and immediately relate parts of it to either themselves or people they know. DIY Meme Marketing. MORE >>

Take YouTube, for example. Second only to Google, YouTube has rapidly emerged as an easy-to-use and reliable search tool; it overtook Yahoo as the second largest search engine in 2008 and is now the fastest-growing media platform in history.  Visual learners comprise 65% of the public, and auditory learners make up another 30%, so it’s no wonder video is the way people learn best.  According to a Universal McCann study cited by Brightcove , people find product information and research most compelling when delivered in video format.  The appeal of the play button. MORE >>

Today, Tom Pick ( @TomPick ), Online Marketing Executive at KC Associates , who blogs at his award winning B2B Webbiquity , and I ( @ckburgess – Blue Focus Marketing @BlueFocus360 ) present 50 remarkable men on our 2011 #Nifty50 Top Twitter Men list. These men are indeed using Twitter to rewire and reorient the Web. So, as promised in Tom Pick’s blog, “ 2011 #Nifty50 Top Twitter Women ”, in honor of mothers, our 2011 #Nifty50 Top Twitter Men now honors fathers. Twitter, not unlike Mother Teresa’s virtues of love, is a delicate ecosystem of real people. MORE >>