Regular roundup of social media news & events applicable to the B2B world.
by Anna Gerz & Mike Wilt

This month’s collection of all things Social Media has Facebook asking questions and reminding us to keep checking in.

What's Your Favorite Facebook Application?
We all knew it was only a matter of time before Facebook set out to try and capitalize on the success of social Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers and Quora, and we saw the update roll out this past month under Facebook Questions. Facebook users ask for recommendations from their friends using status updates daily, so the streamlining of the process into a Facebook-specific feature is fairly inuitive and helpful for individual users, but also presents lots of opportunity for B2B Facebook pages.

Brand pages can easily survey users in order to better customize content and provide additional value to the page fans. While pages have always had the option of incorporating polls via a third-party application, users no longer have to grant permissions and can interact with the question immediately. Facebook Questions also presents a great opportunity to leverage some of the most influential information on the web -- the opinions of others. And this can all be done on a fully-branded page.

Remember to Check In
We (and the rest of the marketing world) have covered FourSquare a good bit in its short two year history. And this month, the location-centric social media crew “released the latest version” of their applications for iOS and Android. As is the case in the mobile and digital world, it's the little things that make the difference. FourSquare's upgrades within the 3.0 release included some interesting upgrades, but for the most part it has been small UI changes that have made the biggest splash.

FourSquare has always leveraged a competitive stream among its users and their friends. Upgrades to the gaming aspect of the program basically equates to the NBA adding the three-point line 30-odd years ago. An emphasis is also placed on exploring users' surrondings by recommending venues via peer review or check-ins. To sweeten the pot, local businesses that are taking advantage of the "Specials" platform baked into the system get a higher billing in the UI and a little more organization to their offer. Now users can find a pub they didn't know was right around the corner, rack up points against their friends checking in and get a free appetizer for being adventurous enough to check it out.

So where's the B2B relevance in all this? First, the upgrades to the applications are decidely more business-friendly. FourSquare tradeshow promotions or mobile product demos just got a little cleaner. But there are deeper lessons here that can relate to any B2B marketer's digital efforts. FourSquare, a company three years young, employing 50 people and serving nearly 7.5 million users, is making strides to continually experiment with, measure and improve their product. And they are doing it by listening to their users, dare I say "checking in," with their audiences on a continual basis. Continuing to learn and grow their influence over the market by staying relevant to their customers.

With a history of showcasing cool tools and "what's next," SXSW kept our attention this month. Here are a few tools worth checking out, all of which received interactive awards during the festival:

• GroupMe
• IFixIt.com
• TheWildernessDowntown.com

What has caught your social-savvy eye this month?