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You wouldn't think that your local megaplex shopping mall is leading the way in terms of social media engagement, but you'd be wrong. Simon Property Group, owners of hundreds of malls across America, is doing it right when it comes to how they engage their store owners and consumers. Let's take a closer look and see some of the lessons learned for your own humble business, even if you aren't a retail establishment that can be seen from the food court.

When was the last time your food tweeted you? In the case of many well-known food brands, an embarrassingly long time ago, as Chris Brogan found out in a post today. He researched food-related Twitter accounts and commented on those that were more suitable for the dumpster along with those that belong squarely front and center on the dinner table. Let's take a closer look at his analysis and also talk about some takeaways for you to, ahem, beef up your own Twitter customer service and make your social media engagement tastier.

If you want to build a vibrant and successful Facebook community for your business, it might pay to take a moment and look at Praetorian Group's FireRescue1 page here. Praetorian is the publishing arm for the trade associations that represent public safety workers. Clearly, their social media strategies are on fire. But the reasons for their popularity and reach of their Facebook and Twitter sites are so simple, you won't need to summon an EMS to implement them in your shop.

A study last month by the Info-Tech Research Group found little difference by organization size in how businesses use social media, and also provided lots of practical information on how enterprises should make use of social media management tools. The report looked at the tools from a variety of vendors, including Radian6, Sprout Social, Syncapse, Socialware, Cymfony, Visible Technologies and Lithium.

Could you build a Twitter account completely from automated tools? Would anyone follow you? Or try to interact with you? Retweet you? Would you become an influencer, at least according to Klout?

Sadly, Andrew Hanelly found the answers to the above questions to be mostly yes. Over the course of several weeks earlier this summer, he took hundreds of Twitter accounts from various sources and constructed a new account, @contentasaurus. (Get it?)

Social media provides companies with new opportunities for customer service, research and marketing (within reason of course), but most respondents to a survey of C-level executive conducted by Harris Interactive for Capgemini aren't yet sure how to harness social media.

Longtime analytics player Webtrends announced a social marketing suite called Webtrends Social, which is actually a revamped version of its Webtrends Apps product. The company says the suite will allow users to create and manage a Facebook presence without writing any code or integrate any other tools.

Of particular note is that Webtrends is one of the few companies with access to the invite-only Facebook Ads API, which means it will be able to create features that few if any of its competitors can replicate at this time.

As seen in the doodle on the Google homepage this morning, today is the first day of summer - a time when families pack up their cars and get away from the real world for a few days. One of the staples of the quintessential summer experience - the beloved ice cream truck - is getting a new spin this year. International brand conglomerate Unilever has introduced an interactive social kiosk that dispenses tasty treats to passers by. The fee? Ice cream lovers need only provide a smile.

According to a new report from Netpop Research, 76% of all U.S. broadband users actively contribute to social media sites in one form or another, and 29% contribute regularly to social networking sites. Among these social networkers, Facebook is quickly catching up to MySpace, though iMeem, LastFM, Digg, and LiveJournal are also very popular with college students. The report also compares the online habits of these social networkers with those broadband subscribers who choose not to contribute to social media sites and finds a number of very interesting differences.