Facebook's Sponsored Stories ad unit, announced earlier this week, is one of those amazingly simple social media ad ideas that also leads to a lot of questions. Why? Because in a manner not seen on Facebook before, we consumers are the ad medium. If that's the case, what's in it for us?

Social media is often appreciated for its virality, which implies a loss of control as messaging spreads beyond target audiences. Marketers still can use social media to target consumers in specific localities, or incorporate social sharing functionality into local programs. Here are ten technologies and ways marketers can use them:

>Raise your hand if you have been to Starbucks in the last week. Now raise your other hand if you have an iPhone or BlackBerry. Now, drop everything, because whether you think of it this way or not, Starbucks launching mobile payments is huge news for location-based social -- even if it doesn't, yet, allow you to get an automatic check-in with your chai latte.

There's a lot of reflection now about the lack of civil discourse in America. I hit my low point last week, thanks to a site you probably haven't heard of called One True Fan. Here's how it happened:

Reading the news this week that Jon Bond (yeah, the Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal & Partners co-founder) was coming onboard to head the social media agency Big Fuel got me thinking a lot about how much the advertising business has changed. But, if you read some of the stories about Bond's appointment, it clearly hasn't changed enough -- for him, anyway -- though he is not alone in that sentiment. Said Bond to Stuart Elliott of The New York Times: "It's easier to start JetBlue than to try to fix Delta."

There are many ways to describe the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, such as: vast, tiring, over the top, technophilic, illuminating, geeky, and productive. One more to add to the list is "social." Now that this year's gadget fest has wrapped, it's time to follow up on last year's roundup and check out the social side of CES 2011.

Now that the oohing and ahhing is over concerning Facebook raising a cool $450 million from Goldman Sachs (and, just for fun, another $50 million from long-time investor Digital Sky Technologies), the rumination has begun. And much of it has had to do not with the business of Facebook itself, but with whether there's something somehow nefarious about the social network's decision not to go public, at least at this time.

The end-of-year holidays offer a perennial reminder that no matter how hard you try, you can never escape your family. My own family often inspires columns here, sometimes directly as in 2005's "Google vs. Grandmom," and sometimes through more convoluted paths. They don't always get credit here, nor do they necessarily seek it, but each of my relatives has his or her own approach to social media. Meet the extended Berkowitz family: