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.

"Verizon finds US developer outsourced his job to China so he could surf Reddit and watch cat videos." -- The Next Web, January 16, 2013. Here is a funny story of Internet craziness: according to a 2012 case study from Verizon, last year an employee of a U.S. software firm was caught outsourcing his work to China, where a developer did his job for less than a fifth of his salary.

Social media will be the most important technology channel used by companies to engage with their customers within three to five years, according to a survey of 1,700 CEOs from around the world conducted by IBM. Currently just 16% of companies use social media as their primary means of interacting with customers, but that proportion will rise to 57% three to five years from now.

The wonders of social media never cease: a new study by researchers at the University of South Carolina's Arnold School of Public Health suggests that individuals may benefit from group weight-loss programs on Twitter, in which participants post details of their progress and encourage each other in the struggle to shed pounds.