NEW YORK TIMES — Beginning Thursday, latte addicts who visit Starbucks outlets can get more than just a caffeine fix. They will also be rewarded on Foursquare with a barista badge. Location-based mobile services like Foursquare are at the cutting edge of a transformation in the way offline businesses and their customers interact, by breaking down the barriers between the physical and the virtual...

Starbucks: Building Meaningful Customer Engagement, by Alexandra Wheeler and Matthew Guiste from GasPedal on Vimeo.

ADVERTISING AGE — Let's get this straight right away: Return on investment in social media is not measured in how many friends you have on Facebook or how many followers you have on Twitter. It's not calculated in trending topics or YouTube comments. It should, in fact, be held to the same criteria other marketing channels are: Did it move your business? It's done just that at Starbucks, which is a digital marketer worth watching...

VENTUREBEAT — For companies to stay relevant these days, and to actually matter in a digital age, they increasingly have to be involved on social networks—Twitter, Facebook, and the like. Everyone’s trying to connect with their customers, to be human, and to make a whole lot of money. But who’s doing it well? That’s the question that The Big Money, from Slate Magazine, went out and asked. Their answers are in a report published today, The Big Money Facebook 50, listing the top 50 brands with official pages on Facebook – plus a lot of interesting analysis...

INSIDE FACEBOOK — With about 27,000 coffee shops in America, and 11,000 or so accounted for by chains, it is no surprise that there are dozens -- even hundreds -- of Facebook Pages dedicated to coffee serving establishments. In this post we’ll cover coffee shop chains, looking at each of the five largest pages and what they’re doing well, or not. In a subsequent post, we’ll feature local coffee shop Pages...