Maybe General Motors should have tried offering coupons on Facebook.

That’s the gist of a new report from Wildfire Interactive. The study looked at 10,000 randomly sampled Facebook campaigns to see which got the highest response rates and earned media. Among the findings were a lack of correlation between the two. The campaigns that got the most earned media were not the ones that got the highest response rates.

If you’re looking for the latter, then coupons, giveaways and sweepstakes are the way to go. If you want people to share your posts, though, then try “pick your favorites” queries, quizzes and trivia contests.

The Google Search of the future is here. Now. Today. The long-talked-about sematic web — Google prefers “Knowledge Graph” — is rolling out across all Google Search tools, and our most fundamental online task may never be the same again.

Starting today, a vast portion of Google Search results will work with you to intuit what you really meant by that search entry. Type in an ambiguous query like “Kings” (which could mean royalty, a sports team or a now-cancelled TV show), and a new window will appear on the right side of your result literally asking you which entity you meant. Click on one of those options and your results will be filtered for that search entity.

If a $1 billion ghost town sounds to you like the set of sci-fi movie, think again. A company called Pegasus Global Holdings is constructing a town in Lea County, N.M. as a testing ground for the latest renewable energy technology and terrorism security systems.

It will look like any other city, filled with office buildings, homes and roads, the BBC reports. The only difference from a regular city: no people will live there.

The site could be used to test self-driving cars, smart grids, citywide wireless networks and just about anything else Pegasus’ clients are interested in.

Discuss the show on Twitter: #BehindTheLaunch

In Mashable‘s new video series, Behind the Launch, we’re taking cameras behind the scenes at Vungle, an in-app video advertising startup. Last week, we met the the founders and saw them bring on Colin Behr to head up business development. This week, they courted big-name startup investors, such as 500 Startups‘ Dave McClure, DFJ Esprit‘s Krishna Visvanathan and AOL Ventures‘ Adam Smith.

What does a family portrait look like when it represents a community of millions of people? For our photo challenge this week, Mashable readers sent us their photos, helping us to create a family portrait of our community.

This past Sunday was Mother’s Day in the U.S. Sons and daughters found time to pick up the phone and call their moms, and many families enjoyed the day together. In honor of Mother’s Day, we asked you to show us a photo that represents family to you.

At Mashable, we loved seeing your photos of family outings, newborn family members and canine best friends. We want to thank you for capturing your meaningful moments and sharing them with us.

Flipboard wants to be the first magazine with a soundtrack.

The company is releasing an update on Tuesday that integrates music-sharing service SoundCloud as well as radio programs from NPR and Public Radio International (PRI).

Flipboard’s app for iPhone and iPad (and soon Android) collects articles, images, photo albums and videos that your friends share on social networks and re-formats them in a personalized magazine.

Its pages will now contain tracks that friends share through SoundCloud, including original recordings and podcasts from publications such as The Economist.

Fox is continuing its viral and digital campaign for Ridley Scott’s Prometheus with a new viral video, a special Twitter chat and a live-streamed red carpet premiere.

To kick things off, Fox will release its latest viral video for the film, “Quiet Eye,” at 7:00am PT on Wednesday. The video features Noomi Rapace as Elizabeth Shaw and was conceived and designed by Ridley Scott and screenwriter Damon Lindelof.

The video, which follows earlier viral videos for the film — including the amazing TEDTalk from the future and the creeptastic “ad” for robot helper “David” — will debut on the Verizon FiOS Facebook page.

Facebook social travel app Gogobot announced on Wednesday that it has reached the 1 million registered users mark.

The app launched on Facebook in January, when the social network unveiled a slew of integrated apps, including Gogobot. Gogobot was in use before that time, launching in private beta 18 month ago. Now the app is exploding in popularity: A new user joins every 15 seconds, more than 5 million places have been shared on Gogobot and overall membership has grown 65x year-on-year.

Even dream weddings can be missing something — friends and family who cannot attend. So what better way to utilize live streaming technology than for a once in a lifetime event? There are a number of web based services that specialize in live streaming weddings. Check out a couple of them here:

Marry Me Live

Stacy Yamaoka and her business partner Christopher Anderson started Marry Me Live in 2009. “It started because we recognized the needs of both of our families,” Yamaoka told Mashable. Anderson’s grandparents weren’t able to attend his sister’s wedding in 2009. By the time wedding Yamaoka’s sister’s wedding rolled around later that year, they decided to live stream the occasion to guests who couldn’t make it.

Welcome to this morning’s edition of “First To Know,” a series in which we keep you in the know on what’s happening in the digital world. Today, we’re looking at four particularly interesting stories.

HTC One X and Evo 4G LTE Delayed at US Customs

HTC’s two new smartphones, the flagship One X and the Evo 4G LTE, have been indefinitely delayed at US customs due to potential infringement on an Apple patent, the Verge reports.

Google Docs just got a little smarter with the introduction of a research pane Tuesday. The pane allows you to tap into a Google Search directly from Google documents to find additional information about a particular topic or idea.

Searches can be for things such as a map to a particular destination, quotes for a research paper, or even images. When you find something you like, you can add it to the document you’re working on by clicking the insert button. Images can be dragged and dropped from the pane into your piece.

After winning an Oscar for writing a screenplay about Facebook, Aaron Sorkin is setting his sights on Apple.

Variety reports that Sorkin has officially signed on to adapt Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, titled Steve Jobs, for Sony Pictures.

Sony optioned the screen rights for Steve Jobs before the book even hit shelves. And almost immediately, the studio began courting Sorkin.

Variety quotes Sony’s co-chairman Amy Pascal as saying, “There is no writer working in Hollywood today who is more capable of capturing such an extraordinary life for the screen than Aaron Sorkin; in his hands, we’re confident that the film will be everything that Jobs himself was: captivating, entertaining, and polarizing.”

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Talktala

Quick Pitch: Talktala is an online platform for group therapy.

Genius Idea: Targeting a support-group demographic rather than diagnosed therapy veterans.

The online support group is almost as old as the Internet. It easily overcomes location, limited budgets and desire for anonymity. Online therapy arrived a bit later, with studies as early as 2009 supporting the theory that an online chat with a psychotherapist could be successful at helping people with depression.

Hitting the friendly skies doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t make a mobile phone call — at least if you’re flying on one of Virgin’s new Airbus A330 planes. The airline plans to make in-flight calling available first on its flight from London to New York. By the end of the year, in-flight calling will be available on 17 planes and at least 10 routes.

Calls will be restricted to the time the plane is actually in the air – so you’ll still have to power off when the plane takes off or lands – and American laws require the service to be turned off when the plane gets within 250 miles of U.S. airspace.

German designers placed a high-tech, sensor-equipped chair in the middle of a palazzo in Milan last month to record stress points on the backsides of thousands of people. The goal? To determine how to design a lightweight and efficient chair that’s sturdy enough to support a wide variety of users.

When someone sat in the chair, monitors recorded data and processed it with an “algorithm that determines the most structurally efficient version of the chair,” according to the blog Co.Design.

The engineers worked with Audi’s Lightweight Design Centre “using methods borrowed from the future of automotive manufacturing,” according to the chair’s website.

What’s good for General Motors doesn’t appear to be good for Ford or Chrysler.

Reps from both carmakers say they’re not following GM’s lead in pulling its ads from Facebook.

Ford gives a particularly spirited defense of the platform.

“We’ve found Facebook ads to be very effective when strategically combined with engagement, great content and innovative ways of storytelling, rather than treating them as a straight media buy,” says Scott Monty, head of social media for Ford. “We continue to have a strong, collaborative relationship with Facebook, which includes first-of-a-kind vehicle reveals, advertising and innovative ways of sharing content. Our engineers have also been working with Facebook engineers to develop unique and safer ways of integrating the car experience with Facebook.”

If you’re like me, you use Google Chrome as your primary browser, and at any one time you have dozens of tabs open. While it’s nice that Chrome remembers your tabs if you ever quit the app, you’ve probably at some point wished you could fire up the same tabs on another machine quickly and easily.

Now you can. With the new version of Chrome (version 19, for those scoring at home), Chrome now syncs all your open tabs across devices, be they PCs, Macs and yes, even phones. Right now the only version of Chrome for phones is a beta version on Android, although an iPhone version is rumored to be in the works.

Mitt Romney has the Republican presidential nomination more or less in the bag, but primary season lives on. Voters in Nebraska and Oregon are headed to the polls Tuesday, with 63 delegates up for grabs. Romney’s collected approximately 973 delegates, so even if he cleans up Tuesday’s voting, he’d still be shy of the “magic number” — 1,144 — needed to formally secure the nomination.

As Facebook gears up for its initial public offering later this week, there’s been a lot of speculation about the company’s valuation. But there’s no denying that its worth to major and up-and-coming brands is invaluable, allowing Facebook users to interact and engage with companies in unprecedented ways.

A new infographic from social marketing firm SocialBakers takes a look at which global brands are making the most of their Facebook presence.

With 157 million Facebook users in the U.S. and 901 million on the site in total, about 83% of members are located outside the 50 states. This means there’s room for brands to grow their global reach.

Ever wonder how your dog is feeling during a run in the park or how your pet is doing while home alone? A smart collar that transmits data to the cloud directly from your pup’s body can now tell you.

Information technology product manufacturer Fujitsu has developed a special device that can be attached to a dog’s collar or harness. From there, the device monitors the number of steps the dog takes, signs of shivering and external temperature. Changes in these numbers, which could point to obesity or diabetes, would also be easier to detect, says Fujitsu.