Apparently social media command centers are now A Thing. For the second year in a row, the Super Bowl -- which somehow manages to be the most important sporting event of all time, year after year -- has its own dedicated social media team that will be tweeting and Facebooking and Tumblring and Instagramming and all that stuff all through Super Bowl weekend.

While it's obviously sensible to avoid sending naked pictures to people you don't know on the Internet, the only way to be really safe may be to avoid taking naked pictures of yourself at all, period, full stop.

Hopefully by this point everyone is aware that the powers that be are monitoring social media. But for anyone who isn't aware: psst, they're monitoring social media! Now you know. According to Twitter's biannual "transparency report," the number of requests made by U.S. law enforcement officials for Twitter user data increased by about 20% between the first and second half of 2012, from 849 to 1,009.

Canadian consumers use social media for researching products, but still prefer to do their shopping in brick-and-mortar retail venues, according to a PricewaterhouseCooper's "2013 Global Multi-Channel Retail Survey" for Canada.

Considering how much of their lives people share with each other on Facebook, it makes sense that people who are suffering from emotional distress might leave clues about their situation on the social network -- and some of these hints could help prevent suicides, provided they're caught early enough and interpreted correctly.

U.S. Hispanics who use social media are more likely than the general social media population to want customer service delivered via social media, according to NM Incite.

Social media has a measurable impact on consumer purchase decisions, according to a new study from the Advertising Research Foundation based on a survey of 2,000 U.S. shoppers. The study was commissioned by the ARF, conducted by Communispace, comScore, Converseon, and Firefly Millward Brown, and sponsored by General Motors, Google, Kraft, Motorola, and Young & Rubicam. Technical guidance was provided by Duke University's Fuqua School of Business.

Facebook is to blame for a veritable Medusa's raft of negative emotional outcomes, according to a study conducted by researchers at two German universities, including envy, resentment, low-self esteem, loneliness, frustration and anger, which can be neatly summed up under the general designation "misery."

A concrete method for measuring return on investment for social media remains elusive, but recent research initiatives may be bringing such an answer within range. In one recent study scheduled to appear in a journal titled Information Systems Research, researchers from the University at Buffalo School of Management, Aalto University and Texas A&M University were able to correlate social media engagement with increased purchases for a large specialty firm in the northeast U.S.

Anyone who argues that engagement with social media tends to be transient and therefore less valuable to advertisers may want to reconsider that opinion in light of a new study from the University of Warwick in the U.K. The study, which is titled "Major memory for microblogs" and appears in the January 2013 issue of Memory & Cognition, suggests that people find it easier to remember the contents of Facebook updates than faces or sentences from books.