In my forthcoming book, I take a look at how Nike has increased sales by tapping into social community marketing initiatives. Instead of simply shoveling more TV and print ads down our throat, Nike is instead shifting its marketing budget to non-traditional channels.

Bank of America is moving into the social networking territory and has launched a site focused on helping small business owners.

Every community operator knows that it takes different kinds of participants to be successful. Some people come looking for answers, others come to help. Some like to expound at length, while others say little. Some are lurkers, others are prolific contributors.

Visitors to the health information site TauMed will see the new video feature integrated into the service and the website’s community.

More news on the open source front today as Autodesk has announced its intent to donate the source code for CS-Map to the Open Source Geospatial Foundation.

Online community builders love to toss around gross numbers – twenty thousand members, two million posts, and so on.

I’m sitting here today at the TechCrunch40, listening to various companies pitch their wares to the people and press that are attending (I’m here as invited press, so will give overview of the companies and what I thought).

Every company is interested in online community and Web 2.0 functionality today, and retail giant Sears is no exception. After seeing a post by Bill Green at Make the Logo Bigger about the retailer’s first effort in this area, I can only conclude that Sears outsourced their community development to their corporate legal team. Signing up for the My SHC Community requires agreeing to an ultra-lengthy privacy policy that Green concluded didn’t offer much privacy.

I’ve found that, in the U.S., I’m likely to hear “or-what?” after uttering the word “Orkut.”  Google’s social network is quite popular overseas, however, and this status was recently confirmed when Orkut was chosen as the Youth Icon of 2007 in a contest sponsored by MTV India and Pepsi.

Social food networking site Allrecipes.com has added a new Community feature to its site that allows users to find recipes by geographic region.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales would like you to help him build the revenue for his new “for profit” venture Wikia. Wikia has acquired the distributed crawler Grub from LookSmart and Wales plans to make it open source. He’d like to invite the community to line his coffers.