An environmental activists campaign urging consumers to nudge chocolatier Nestlé away from using Indonesian palm oil in its products exploded last week on Nestlé’s and its Kit Kat product’s Facebook Pages. The outcry helped prompt the company to announce plans to eliminate the oil in its Kit Kat product by mid-May, and reiterate its commitment to use only oil certified as sustainable by 2015.

For Facebook Page administrators, the lesson here is to be clear and responsive about user concerns, regardless of the situation. For activists looking to use Facebook as a campaigning tool, the jury is still out on how big of an effect it can have, overall. Here’s a closer look.

The anti-Nestlé effort was launched last Wednesday by environmental group Greenpeace to help promote its new report, “Caught Red-Handed: How Nestlé’s Use of Palm Oil is Having a Devastating Impact on Rainforest, The Climate and Orang-utans.” It detailed how the demand for palm oil from Nestlé and other large companies is prompting palm oil growers to illegally chop down endangered rainforests for more land.

In addition to the campaign’s web site and Facebook page, Greenpeace provided a visceral boost with a viral video featuring an office worker inadvertently eating an orangutan finger instead of a Kit Kat. Combined, the efforts got many Facebook activists to post to Nestlé and Kit Kat’s Facebook Pages, with reactions ranging from sensible to silly to outright angry. Fans, on the behest of Greenpeace, asked Nestlé to stop purchasing palm oil specifically from Sinar Mas, a company accused of breaking Indonesian law by clearing protected rain forests to grow palm oil.

Protesting fans used profile pictures that featured orangutans holding up signs with altered Nestlé logos. As we reported last week, Nestlé was also scolded by fans for attempting to censor the Facebook outcry by posting the following language, “To repeat: we welcome your comments, but please don’t post using an altered version of any of our logos as your profile pic–they will be deleted.” More than the legal complexity of this claim, fans felt like Nestlé really wasn’t listening. Eventually, it backed off the tactic. Meanwhile, “fans” — people who joined the Pages specifically to criticize Nestlé — are continuing to post about the accusations.

But Nestlé has been trying to recover the PR battle. The company said in a lengthy statement last week that it has already stopped working with Sinar Mas, been investigating abuse and looking closely at ways that deforestation-grown palm oil was entering its “complex” supply chain. There’s already corporate precedent for ditching the supplier – Unilever previously dropped its palm oil contract with Sinar Mas, following a similar Greenpeace campaign. While it has gotten some coverage on this point in media outlets, the Pages continue to be dominated by activists.

The company could be doing more to use the Page to explain its side. For starters, it should post the statement on the site — perhaps as a note, leaving it open for discussion by fans and critics. It should also assign representatives who can speak on behalf of the company in response to specific points raised by the company. Nestlé is responsible to its shareholders for its overall performance, not just the most vocal Facebook users; and while many people will not agree with its decisions, the company has at least taken the time to provide its perspective in public. It shouldn’t let this effort go to waste.

We’ve reported that social media has helped activists make a difference in their communities, such as Iran’s Green Revolution and the violence in Ciudad Juárez in Mexico, yet all of these examples are anecdotal.

Aside from the timing of Nestlé’s response, we don’t have a lot of data showing results from Page. The stock price appears unaffected, for example. How many consumers are going to stop buying Nestlé products as a result of campaign? Even if Facebook helped influence the announcement timing, how will Nestlé’s changes impact the palm oil industry?

For brands facing organized campaigns, the obvious take-away from this situation is to try to address consumer concerns instead of censoring them. Antagonistic responses — or lack of any response — just makes the brand look guiltier of all accusations, no matter how fair they are. Brands need to make Facebook Pages a key place to respond directly. Nestlé did a good job of articulating its complex position, but it should use its Page to continue doing so. While this may not be comfortable for companies, the other options can be even more damaging.

Meanwhile, for activists looking to build movements using Facebook, the takeaway is similar. Greenpeace and other groups should (and we expect will) continue steadily promoting their views to Facebook fans. Using viral tactics to expose damaging business practices is a good one-time tactic, but building long-term awareness about issues is a constant process. It’s easy for a user to post a pre-planned campaign message on a Page, but it’s harder to get them to do substantive things, like change buying behavior, or become informed, helpful members of the cause.

Zynga’s hits Texas Hold’em Poker and Mafia Wars are still holding strong at number 1 and 2, respectively, in this week’s list of the 20 Pages that gained the most Facebook fans in the last 7 days. We get these numbers from our PageData tool, which tracks the growth of Pages over time. Rounding out the list were a few musicians, television shows and a mixed bag of politicians, media companies and Starbucks.

	Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Texas Hold’em Poker	14,857,066	+668,595	+4.71
2.	Mafia Wars	10,663,878	+392,594	+3.82
3.	Lady Gaga	5,825,121	+141,025	+2.48
4.	FaceMoods	1,027,909	+140,708	+15.86
5.	Starbucks	6,331,381	+132,528	+2.14
6.	Justin Bieber	2,300,923	+126,795	+5.83
7.	Lay’s	937,903	+119,119	+14.55
8.	The Artifice	3,209,195	+113,916	+3.68
9.	Facebook	7,770,799	+108,268	+1.41
10.	Vodafone it	411,737	+105,580	+34.49
11.	Selena Gomez	3,992,715	+93,977	+2.41
12.	redbox	265,306	+91,059	+52.26
13.	Zoosk	711,703	+81,258	+12.89
14.	Alice in Wonderland	1,173,325	+80,233	+7.34
15.	Sony	150,040	+79,228	+111.88
16.	Universal Orlando Resort	88,575	+79,021	+827.10
17.	HGTV	373,791	+75,639	+25.37
18.	ESPN	364,288	+75,392	+26.10
19.	Mozilla Firefox	1,022,056	+69,291	+7.27
20.	Benigno “Noynoy” S. Aquino III	956,557	+69,201	+7.80

Texas Hold’em Poker and Mafia Wars — in that order — have been, for the most part, holding steady at the top of our Page gainers since the beginning of February. This week Poker inched closer to 15 million fans with an addition of more than 668,000 fans while Mafia Wars passed 10 million fans and added 392,500 this week. It’s also interesting to note that Zynga is promoting its other games, namely Zynga Poker’s Slots and Poker Blitz, on their Texas Hold’em Poker Facebook Page.

Lady Gaga was third in fan gains this week with more than 141,000 added to her 5.8 million count, showing gains over last week when she was tenth. Gaga led the musicians on our list this week, probably because tickets for her North American tour went on sale last week, in addition to continued success of her “Telephone” single in the U.S. and UK.

Fellow musicians Justin Bieber, at number 6, and Selena Gomez, at eleventh, were also on last week’s list at just about the same place. Bieber showed steady growth, staying in the news with a new single coming out on iTunes and several performances on U.S. television. Teenage star Selena Gomez took the number 11 spot adding almost 94,000 fans last week, still readying for her upcoming European tour and premiering the trailer of her new summer movie “Ramona and the Beezus” on her Facebook Page.

There was quite a mixed bag of Pages on the list this week, many of them due to what seemed to be unofficial Page consolidations on Sunday.

Emoticon add-on FaceMoods was fourth this week, adding almost 141,000 fans with steady growth during the last week; FaceMoods was number 12 on our list last week. There doesn’t seem to be any outstanding reason for its popularity. Fifth place went to Starbucks, which added 132,500 fans — 107,800 of them Sunday — but the company is also promoting its free pastry day this week.

Lay’s potato chips’ fan Page took seventh place this week, adding 119,000 fans, almost all of which were added on Sunday, The Artifice was eighth, Facebook was ninth, Vodafone it took number 10 and Redbox was twelfth. At 13 was dating site Zoosk, which added 81,000 fans and also had a Sunday jump of 59,000 fans, or maybe Facebook dating is just becoming more popular?

The “Alice in Wonderland” Page was fourteenth this week with more than 80,000 fans added; this movie is was the number 1 movie in the U.S. last week. It’s interesting to note that we previously wrote about the multiple Pages set up to promote this movie — one for the main movie, the White Queen, Red Queen and Mad Hatter — but only the main Page was ever on our list of Top 20.

More random Pages rounded out the list. Sony benefitted from Page consolidation and was fifteenth, Univeral Orland Resort at 16, HGTV at seventeenth, ESPN at number 18 and Mozilla Firefox at 19, crossing the threshold into 1 million fans.

Number 20 was interesting this week, a name we haven’t seen on the list since January, the Page of Filipino presidential contender Benigno “Noynoy” S. Aquino III. He’s one of the frontrunners, so it’s not inconceivable that he would have added 69,000 fans over the last week, but he was also at the center of a land distribution controversy that The New York Times wrote about this week.

According to The Times Aquino has been taken to task over his family’s own land distribution troubles, especially because his mother, former Filipino President Corazón C. Aquino, started the program two decades ago. Current candidate Aquino has been taken to task after his family’s plantation Hacienda Luisita failed to distribute land to 10,000 farmers, although he recently announced that his family would transfer the land as soon as the debts were paid off.

Three weeks ago, Facebook formally removed application content from its notifications channel altogether. However, even after March 1st, Facebook still delivered “wall post” notifications to recipients when an application was used to create a post on a friend’s wall.

However, since last week, it appears that for many users and applications, these app wall post notifications have not been getting delivered, and it’s affecting traffic for many apps, significantly in a few cases. We don’t know if this is a bug or an intentional deprecation by Facebook, but we’ll let you know when we do. We would guess this is not intentional, because we imagine Facebook would want users to always be notified when a friend posts content of any kind to their wall.

A Facebook spokesperson says they are looking into the matter. A bug has been filed related to this here.

Update: According to Facebook, this is indeed a bug, as we guessed, and has now been fixed. Apps should now see wall post notifications resuming.

A surprising fact came up at last week’s 2010 Media Summit in New York. An eBay spokesman said that Zynga was PayPal’s second-largest merchant in 2009, following eBay itself. Overall, PayPal processed about $500 million in virtual goods payments last year, according to the estimate of Citi analyst Mark Mahaney, who wrote a recap of the summit.

It’s not clear whether Zynga came in second based on the number of transactions or the total amount processed, but it’s probably the latter. Either way, the company is leading a whole new market onto PayPal.

The payments company’s total volume is over $60 billion per year, by the way, much of which comes from eBay — the auction site is still huge, despite its problems in recent years. Much of the rest of PayPal’s income probably comes from hundreds of thousands of much smaller sources, so it’s no surprise that Zynga could reach number two so quickly.

> Continue reading on Inside Social Games.

Many event promoters at last week’s South By Southwest Music Festival used Facebook Events to replace or complement event listings on their websites. The annual showcase of upcoming musical artists presents a challenge to bands, promoters and venues who must compete with dozens of concurrent events for attendees. While in previous years most promoters chose to register RSVPs through a custom form on their site or by providing an email address to contact, Facebook events hosted by Pages became much more prevalent this year.

For example, of the 110 unofficial parties listed for Friday, March 19th on event listings aggregator Plancast and popular city blog Austinist, 48 had Facebook events. Note that many of those without formal events still announced details in updates to related Pages. This adoption may signal that more of the 3.5 million Facebook events created each year, up from 2.5 million announced in July, are professionally organized public events. This is good news for Facebook, which is preparing improvements to its Events app later this year, we hear.

Subscription music service Mog opted to forego posting details of its  SXSW party to its site, instead creating a Facebook event hosted by their Page. While the party also had a listing on local Austin events calendar DO512, that listing had less than half as many RSVPs and was not updated with set times as was the Facebook event.

There are many advantages to using Facebook over the alternatives. Those RSVP’d to Facebook events can easily access a calendar of events and their up-to-date details, which is especially helpful since many SXSW events are promoted before lineups and set times are finalized. Promoters can reach those RSVP’d through their message inbox, a much less noisy channel than email. Lastly, RSVP’ing to an event places a link to the event on the attendee’s wall and in the News Feed of their network, generating leads.

Brands looking to increase awareness through event sponsorship, i.e. “JanSport Presents the Under the Radar SXSW 2010 Day Party” also receive impressions through the wall and live feed from those who can’t attend. Interestingly, event hosts missed a significant opportunity to increase their Page statistics, as none of the SXSW events we came across included a call to become fans in their descriptions — although Levi’s/Fader Fort was a notable exception.

Similar to how brands are discovering the importance of Pages to their existing promotional mix, those looking to throw events are realizing there’s much to gain by posting them on Facebook. This shift combined with rumors of Facebook adding geolocation features and potentially ticket selling partnerships could make the site a powerful way to discover, buy tickets for, find out details about, and check-in to events.

Event organizers, be sure to check out more details about how to use Events as part of your promotional campaign in our Facebook Marketing Bible.

Levi’s has made its biggest effort yet to reach Facebook users, by using its Page and other features to popular live music venue, Fader Fort, at the South by Southwest Music conference and festival last week in Austin, Texas. The move builds on its long-standing partnership with The Fader music publication — a way for Levi’s to get influential young music lovers buying more of its apparel.

Officially known as “Levi’s/Fader Fort” — although most concertgoers call it “Fader Fort” — the 9 year-old event is literally a big compound located a short walk from the main festival in downtown Austin. It’s complete with a main stage, a couple DJ side-booths, free drinks and a Levi’s jeans product store and tailoring facility (where performers can get a free pair of fitted jeans, which from what we saw they wore on stage).

Facebook is essentially a new way for musicians, Levi’s and the many other sponsors, including Zynga, and vendors involved to take the big event they have going and reach even more users. Thousands of people attended last Tuesday through Saturday, drawn by headline acts from Metrics and The Constellations, Yelawolfe, Memory Tapes, Bone Thugs ‘n Harmony and dozens more, and the promotion the fort had gotten from Fader, Levi’s and other sponsors.

We sat down at the event with Levi’s director of digital marketing, Megan O’Connor, to hear more about the effort. Levi’s will be focusing its social media efforts on Facebook this year, she tells us, and the promotion is its first big move.

The company has designed its Page to revolve around the fort, at the moment. It has been posting regular updates throughout the week on its main Levi’s Facebook Page, including messages, photos and videos of bands and attendees, and been providing a live stream of each show in a tab on the Page, and on the Fort Fader web site, with the help of live broadcaster Justin.tv. Social marketing platform company, Involver, which has been working closely with Levi’s to create it’s Facebook Presence, has been powering the Music application in another tab. Users can listen to full songs from performing bands here, and share them with their Facebook friends. The app also includes a poll — “What’s your favorite tactic for selecting SXSW shows?” — and a video archive.

The Page does not neglect direct product tie-ins. The Style tab, also by Involver, shows users the latest fashion coming out of Levi’s, and includes photo slideshows and links to the Levi’s home web site. Now that the event is done, the company is also advertising discounts on its “rocker style” jeans through the page.

To help promote the Page and Fort Fader, Levi’s also began running home page ads on Facebook at the beginning of the month, including RSVP ads for the Fort Fader Facebook event Page, ads asking users to become fans of the Levi’s Page, and video ads. Levi’s targeted the ads to users ages 18 to 34, who designated music as an interest in their profiles.

The stats on these products, from O’Connor:

• The ad campaign has received 72 million impressions in total to date
• Live streaming began Wednesday, and has received half a millions views in the last two days on Facebook. This does not count its its videos on its home site, YouTube and elsewhere.
• Songs have been shared nearly 3,000 times on Facebook
• The fan page has grown by more than 40% in the last two weeks. It now has 238,000 monthly active users

One key lesson from this year, so far, is that the company will focus its advertising within the space of a week instead of spread out over a longer time period — a fact that any big Facebook advertiser can potentially learn from. Facebook is a different advertising medium from other forms of web advertising. While brand banner advertising, for example, relies on frequency and reach, advertising on Facebook should be designed around the social graph. By concentrating Facebook ads in a short time frame, the company can potentially trigger more viral growth of its message — for example, if many of a user’s friends RSVP to an ad or become a fan of a Page, Facebook is more likely to display a story about that in their news feed. If this effect can kick in for many different users, the advertiser can greatly increase the number of people who see news feed stories related to the campaign.

But Facebook advertising, Pages and other features are getting an increasing amount of experimentation from brands. Levi’s has taken a bigger plunge than most of its apparel rivals, that we’ve seen, and the results so far appear promising. The company plans to use its Page to promote other events later this year, including the CMJ Music Marathon — another music tie-in — and the launch of Levi’s fall product line — according to O’Connor. More information on events integration, Facebook advertising, and other marketing tools that Levi’s leveraged for its live music-driven campaign can be found in the Facebook Marketing Bible, our comprehensive guide to brand marketing and advertising on Facebook.

Growth is remarkably low on this week’s AppData list of fastest-gaining Facebook apps by monthly active users. Where last week the top set of apps had all gained over five million new users, this week there’s only one with over a million, and it’s a game: Social City, by Playdom. Social City is doing quite well, but we cover its category over at Inside Social Games.

So what’s left? A pretty desultory collection. Static FBML, you might point out, is an exception with 2.6 million new MAU; but as we point out each week, it’s a Facebook app that’s just adding everyone that interacts with custom Pages. The rest of the top five are games. We’ll have to go lower to find points of interest.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Social City	7,432,756	+3,142,460	+42.28
2.	Static FBML	47,593,199	+2,858,075	+6.01
3.	Benzerini Bul	1,348,581	+989,490	+73.37
4.	Bubble Island	3,042,559	+796,980	+26.19
5.	Tiki Resort	3,166,817	+754,426	+23.82
6.	Facebook for iPhone	29,717,149	+714,733	+2.41
7.	Show Some Love!	2,037,205	+658,349	+32.32
8.	Keyboard Mash!	1,392,683	+617,924	+44.37
9.	Friends Emotions [Emociones de Amigos]	525,022	+499,396	+95.12
10.	Mobile	19,096,150	+498,447	+2.61
11.	Texas HoldEm Poker	28,510,464	+484,202	+1.70
12.	MindJolt Games	21,397,607	+476,266	+2.23
13.	Towner	1,415,277	+433,498	+30.63
14.	CBSSports.com Brackets	485,705	+410,009	+84.42
15.	Bracket Challenge by Citizen Sports	812,787	+371,109	+45.66
16.	How dirty are you ?	1,376,742	+349,226	+25.37
17.	Jeux Gratuits	1,342,805	+342,663	+25.52
18.	PetVille	20,148,216	+329,566	+1.64
19.	Music Pets	940,633	+327,914	+34.86
20.	what tattoo best fits you?	1,370,661	+326,285	+23.80

Show Some Love, at number six, is the latest poke app to take off. By an eponymous developer, the app has actually been around for years, but its growth only picked up a a couple weeks ago.

A couple of LOLapps‘ quizzes, user-created content from Quiz Creator that we talked about more last week on our emerging games list, have also broken into this list with over a million new MAU among them. They’re How dirty are you ? and what tattoo best fits you?. Incidentally, user-created quizzes are now nine of LOLapps’ top 10 apps.

CBSSports.com Brackets and Bracket Challenge by Citizen Sports are in another category of their own. During the March Madness basketball season, these virtual betting apps will remain big. If you don’t follow sports, think of them as being a bit like fantasy football, but more tied to the real-world results of the ongoing NCAA basketball championships.

Check out the top headlines and insights this week from Inside Social Games – tracking all the latest developments at the intersection of games and social platforms.

Monday, March 15th, 2010

• Paradise Paintball Gets a Big Upgrade and an Award
• The Post-Notification Era on Facebook’s Platform: Viral Marketing Isn’t Dead Yet
• Which Media Giant Will Pull the Social Gaming Acquisition Trigger First?
• Playdom Leads the City Builders Among This Week’s Fastest Gaining Facebook Games by Monthly Active Users
• Zynga’s New Social Poker Game Dials the Cute Up, Gambling Skills Down

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

• Chatting Up Tower Defense Games in Tweet Defense
• War, and Peace – A Look at Two Lesser Known Facebook Titles
• Zynga’s Poker Blitz – The Best Poker Game You’ll Play Today
• MetroGames Gets $5 Million Investment – from Playdom

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

• Social City Leads on This Week’s List of Top Gaining Social Games on Facebook by DAU
• Checking In to Playfish’s New Facebook Game, Hotel City
• Street Fighter IV: Arcade-to-iPhone Goodness
• Yahoo Buying Social App & Game Developer Citizen Sports

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

• MetroGames Competes Against Bigger Rivals with Facebook City Building Game Towner
• Zynga Researching User Interest In a Social City Building Game
• Playfish’s Hotel City Opens Doors to the Facebook Gaming Public
• Zynga Was PayPal’s Second-Largest Merchant in 2009

Friday, March 19th, 2010

• Pets and Avatars Top This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games
• Ngmoco Shares How It Is Making Successful Mobile Social Games
• Most People Want to Play Games With Their Friends
• Social Gaming Roundup: Tencent, Nintendo, Dinosaurs, and More

Facebook already has more than 1000 employees, and it said it plans to increase that by at least 50% this year, according to previous reports. That number has been growing fast, from what we’ve gathered. It is now past 1300, according to sources, although Facebook is only confirming that it is above 1200. We heard it was at 900 towards the end of last year.

Expect the number of employees to keep growing this year. The company is opening up a 200-person office in Austin, Texas, and planning to do considerable local hiring. It is also opening an office with an unknown of employees in Hyderabad, India. And, it is continuing to hire elsewhere in sales offices around the world.

But most of all, it has just moved half the home office staff down the street from its current headquarters in Palo Alto, California, we’ve confirmed — it happened, as scheduled, around March 12. The roomy new space, an old medical devices facility, has 235,000 square feet — more than the current office’s 135,000, although 85,000 of the new space is warehouse space that needs to be remodeled to useful for most needs. The company now has plenty of room to expand its main operations. Like 1601 California, Facebook’s product designers worked on designing the new space too.

Facebook has continued to stress that growth will be measured. “We could easily double in size, and we’re actually making a conscious decision not to do that,” a Facebook spokesperson recently told the San Jose Mercury News. “I think growth can spiral out of control very quickly.” Thing is, Facebook’s revenue is looking healthy, increasing to between $600 and $700 million last year, according to our estimates, and to $1.1 billion for this year.

[Image via the Merc.]

FTC to Facebook: ‘Step Up’ Privacy Protections – The fallout from Google Buzz continues as the Federal Trade Commission turned its attention to Google, Microsoft and Facebook during a recent privacy workshop. Specifically, Facebook as criticized for its recent privacy changes.

“I am especially concerned that technology companies are learning harmful lessons from each other’s attempts to push the privacy envelop,” says outgoing FTC Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour. “Even the most respected and popular online companies, the ones who claim to respect privacy, continue to launch products where the guiding privacy policy seems to be, ‘Throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks.’”

Harbour is especially concerned that these big tech companies weren’t appropriately encrypting consumer data in their clouds and that consumers should have the “ultimate decision” in signing up for new features, given that the FTC seems to want to shape the debate about consumer privacy and “take action” against companies that don’t live up to their privacy promises.

Small Change in Friend Request Emails – Facebook has slightly changed the way it notifies users of friend requests. Before the subject line of these emails was “X added you as a friend on Facebook,” but Wirt points out that the new notices say, “Will you be X’s friend on Facebook?”

Facebook’s URL Shortener Slows Down the Web – URL shorteners, especially Facebook’s, add to the amount of time it takes for a page to load, according to a recent study from Dutch startup WatchMouse, which monitored the redirection time for 14 URL shortening services for a month, every five minutes, from its 44 monitoring stations around the world.

It turns out that uptime is still an issue for some of the URL services, only goo.gl and twt.tl had a perfect 100%, and fb.me was the slowest, adding an average of two seconds to the time between a click and page load, although many others tack on more than half a second to page load time.

WatchMouse announced on its blog that it plans to continue to monitor these URL shorteners and share the results publicly here.

Facebook Passes on Panic Button – The rape and murder of a 17 year-old British girl at the hands of a man she met on Facebook has caused uproar in the UK, where the public and authorities have called on Facebook to install a “panic button” to allow children to report suspected pedophiles. Facebook has announced that it will not install the feature because the current system for reporting abuse was “robust” enough.

Scam Poses As Facebook App – Facebook scammers are using applications to gain access to users’ accounts posing as those “Who’s Looking At Your Profile?” apps that pop up on Facebook pretty frequently. Rik Ferguson reported that this version of spam has at least 25 different copies with names like “peeppeep-pro,” “profile-check-online,” and “stalk-my-profile” that promise users to show them who’s looking at their Facebook profile, but instead infect their profile with spam.

Ferguson wrote that Facebook users who install the app seemingly receive notifications from their friends encouraging them to install the app, and while trying to install the app, users are simply pushed into a similar app to ultimately earn the scammer more revenue.

Facebook Doesn’t Affect Students’ Grades – Facebook’s official blog published an interview this week with researcher Chuck Martin from the University of New Hampshire’s Whittemore School of Business and Economics. He found that the amount of time students spent using social media doesn’t affect their grades. Martin studied Facebook, YouTube, blogs, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn as social media on more than 1,100 of his university’s students.

One interesting findings included that heavy and light social media users received the same grades, that’s to say, there’s no correlation between using Facebook and grades. Martin said this is because these students grew up with social media, and so it’s a part of their behavioral patterns, it’s integrated into their lives — not the “distraction” that some worry about.

Facebook Serves as Forum for Nestlé Criticism – One environmentalist group’s mission to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions blew up on Facebook as an Internet campaign from Greenpeace snowballed into an all-out anti-Nestlé campaign. When Greenpeace’s effort to get Nestlé to cut down on palm oil — which contributes to deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions and endangered species loss — took to Facebook supporters starting changing their profile photos to anti-Nestlé slogans that incorporated the company logo, eventually many critics started posting to its Facebook Page. Controversy arose after the company asked commenters to not post with altered company logos, which is fair under intellectual property laws, but of course this added to the fray and eventually Nestlé apologized to its fans. An interesting lesson in the pitfalls of social media.

ConnectU Case Continues – Yet another chapter in the ConnectU-Facebook saga played out this week when a New York judge blocked an attempt by ConnectU to force Facebook to respond to subpoenas seeking information about the value of its stock. ConnectU tried to retrieve this information to address a dispute between attorneys Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and the ConnectU founders over how much the attorneys were due for representing ConnectU during its 2007 settlement with Facebook and founder Mark Zuckerberg. The Facebook stock in the settlement was valued at $65 million at the time, but now ConnectU founder believe their stock is worth less, hence the subpoenas. The entire affair is pretty complicated, but explained well by Law.com.