Mashable asked C-suite execs from companies like Virgin, Ford and IBM for their best social media advice, which is listed below, straight from their mouths. Which tip is your favorite? Let us know — and leave your own tips — in the comments below.

via 10 Top Execs Share Their Social Media Secrets.

Marketers are suckers for a catch phrase, from “join the conversation” to “think like a publisher.” Now, thanks largely to Facebook Timeline for brand pages, the new marketing slogan has quickly become, “humanize the brand.”

Humanizing a brand simply means trying to interact with each customer on a personal level. But for a company to implement that style, there needs to be a shift in how it responds to customers, particularly via social media. Here are 10 ways to get started.

via 10 Ways to Humanize Your Brand on Social Media.

While brands are reaching more and more consumers via their Facebook pages, companies are not realizing the full potential of engaging and interacting with these brand fans.

In December 2011, consulting firm A.T. Kearney analyzed the conversations happening on Facebook between 50 of the world’s top brands and their fans, comparing their interactions to those in December 2010.

The study found that in 2011, 94% of the 50 top brands’ Facebook pages directed users to a one-way communication page, such as a tab or a closed Facebook wall that didn’t allow consumers to initiate a conversation. This was up from 91% of the top 50 brands’ pages in 2010. Additionally, 56% of those brands did not respond to a single customer comment on their Facebook page in 2011; the same percentage of nonresponses as in 2010.

via Are Brands Ignoring Facebook’s Interactive Potential? – eMarketer.

Creative excellence has always been at the heart of Coca Cola’s advertising and they have decided that content is now the key to marketing in the 21st century on a social web.

Content for Coca Cola is is now the “Matter” and “Substance” of “Brand Engagement”

So what can we learn from Coca Cola’s new marketing strategy?

via 5 Lessons from Coca Cola’s New Content Marketing Strategy | Jeffbullas’s Blog.

Human beings are social by nature, and not surprisingly, we choose to spend much of our talkative time on Facebook.Comscore released data in December 2011 that showed Facebook is virtually synonymous with social media. Worldwide, people spend three out of every four minutes of their total social networking time on Facebook.Check out the recent comment counts on nearly any major Facebook brand Page — the numbers get big very quickly. Disney’s image of Happy, the dwarf from Snow White earned over 1,600 comments at the time of publication. Coca-Cola asked fans whether they have ice-cold Cokes in their fridges – 2,170+ comments.

via How Brands Can Manage Facebook Comment Overload.

Research – DISQUS.

Although it only seems to be community managers that actually care about this day, let me tell you that they are probably the most amazing, good-looking and talented people in every company you care to name.

This is where I should mention I am a community manager for Brandwatch, which in no way makes my opinion biased in this matter.

To mark the special day, the guys over at Social Fresh compiled a report into the role of community managers. You can read the full 15-page report here.

via Everything You Wanted To Know About Community Managers (Infographic) | Business 2 Community.

It’s the third annual Community Manager Appreciation Day every fourth Monday of Jan and I’d like to salute the folks working on the front lines at companies big and small leading the charge.These folks are critical in the change as companies have moved from the static website to the dynamic human focused social business we’re seeing across every agency.

via A Worldwide Salute to Community Managers « Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing.

Some sites seem to attract really low quality comments, such as Yahoo! Answers or YouTube, while others usually have comments higher quality, such as Ask MetaFilter, StackOverflow, or Hacker News. What can you do to ensure you have the type of users that leave higher quality comments?

via (3) How do you build a community of users that give high quality comments on a website? – Quora.

Not all social media users are convinced that connecting with companies on social sites will be more than a passing fad, according to research from Conversocial, but those that do seem to expect that the connection will be two-way.

The social media customer service software provider asked about user attitudes toward companies that left their questions on Facebook and Twitter unanswered; most said they would be at least a little bit angry, including over a quarter who would no longer do business with the company. At the same time, nearly 28% said they understood that companies don’t have time to respond to each consumer.

via Do Social Media Postings Always Require a Brand Response? – eMarketer.