GM, started to re-evaluate its Facebook strategy earlier this year after its marketing team began to question the effectiveness of the ads.

The company, which bought about $10 million worth of paid advertising on Facebook, will continue to invest in its free presence and content on its brand and fan page (which has more than 370,000 likes).

There’s no chance big companies will abandon social marketing, but this Forrester analyst highlighted a shift of focus the company may need to make post-IPO:

As good as Facebook has been at evolving to serve consumers, that’s how bad it’s been at serving marketers. In the past five years Facebook has lurched from one advertising model to another. … [and] still hasn’t stumbled upon a model that’s proven consistently successful for marketers … At the same time, Facebook often stands directly in the way of marketers’ efforts to measure the performance of their programs.

In other words, improving its analytics toolsets and techniques will be a critical effort if Facebook is to match the current hype and deliver fully as a publicly traded company.

advertisers will spend $2.9 billion on in-app advertising this year, while consumers will spend $26.1 billion buying [apps].

A total of 32 billion apps will be downloaded, representing 38% growth over 2011. Meanwhile, the mobile ad network InMobi says the number of ads viewed by mobile consumers grew 21 percent in the first quarter of 2012, to 283 billion total ads.

According to one Google executive, the move is about making sure “that digital media is an environment that really works for brands” and “helping brands … truly and effectively measure the efficacy of their campaigns online.” Of course, they will also make it easier for brands to compare online and offline marketing initiatives.

• Americans viewed more than 8.3 billion video ads in March 2012
• Video ads reached 51% of the total U.S. population
• Hulu topped the provider list, providing an average of 51 ads to its viewers; ESPN was a distant second, with an average of 26 ads per user

As for video content:

37 billion video views occurred during the month, with Google sites generating the highest number at 15.7 billion.

Here’s our take on the opportunities and challenges related to online video for companies seeking to take advantage.

Advertising, the revenue source of choice for many Internet upstarts, isn’t keeping pace with the explosive growth in the smartphone platform.

The numbers are astonishing:

• Mobile start-ups received $5.8 billion in venture capital in 2011
• Mobile ads accounted for $1.45 billion last year, or less than 1% of all ad dollars spent
• Pandora generated $100 million from mobile ad sales, or 45% of its revenue, though mobile usage accounted for 70% of its listener hours and the company sold less than 25% of its mobile ad inventory.

A study by video-ad platform Vindico found that all but 2% of videos ads that flowed through its platform in 2011 consisted of repurposed creative from TV commercials as marketers look to extend their TV campaigns to online.

While there may be some advantages in terms of brand consistency and lower product costs, straight repurposing of TV ads suggests that many marketers aren’t quite adjusted to the need to master the digital world. Interestingly, the study – full version here – predicts that adoption of more interactive formats is likely in 2012 and highlights how long-form content with ads may be the right option for marketers. That’s because online viewers don’t automatically overlook skippable ad formats.

A few other key findings that caught our eye:

• “Click Through Rate is the ‘King of False Positives’: CTR is no longer the golden metric of audience interest in a brand.
• “Completers” are better than ‘Clickers’: The value of viewers who watch your ads to completion is much higher than that of viewers who click the ad.”

We do agree with a few of his points. One, “correlating social to sales and revenue isn’t easy.” Two, the core problem analytics pros are trying to solve remains:

that CFOs aren’t impressed with engagement. Likes, and the like, represent value, but not ROI. ROI is a financial metric and it must be stated in dollars and cents. There’s no column on the balance sheet for likes. Likes are the new click-through rates –- an abstract statistic that really makes sense only to the resident digital-media guru.

But just because some CFOs may be more comfortable with old-school measurement models doesn’t mean they should simply be applied to the social realm. We think the most important first step when it comes to engagement in particular and social media in general is to think carefully about metrics definition.

The Times’s website has seen some traffic declines since it started charging for online access last March. [The company] decided after studying reader behavior that 10 articles was a better cutoff between visitors and subscribers because there are relatively few people who read more than 10 but less than 20 articles per month, a spokeswoman said. Basically, they found that most nonsubscribers are either looking for a few articles or want quite a lot. Consequently, the paper doesn’t expect the new model to have any impact on its online traffic, she said.

The Times has 454, 000 digital subscribers, including the growing number of consumers getting their news via mobile devices and social media. That’s up from 390,000 at the end of December.

Of course, many newspapers are still seeking the right approach:

The challenge for all papers is that free content is still plentiful online. And many papers don’t provide much motivation for new sign-ups. Most publishers are giving full online access to existing print subscribers, so the pool of potential new digital subscribers is relatively small. [However] distributing news to online readers is much cheaper than delivering papers, so digital readers are inherently more profitable per capita, publishers say.