You have to feel a bit sorry for the JetBlue Twitter team today. Their most popular ever employee, flight attendant Steven Slater a.k.a. “the greatest American hero,” may be free from jail, but the company is in no mood to celebrate. Instead, the airline is parrying aside public queries from the press and even the occasional stab at humor.

It’s never an easy decision to kill off a brand, particularly a geeky brand that was all the rage just a year ago. So, not surprisingly, Google’s announcement yesterday to pull the plug on Google Wave, a real-time communication/collaboration app, is not going over so well this morning with die-hards who’ve taken to Twitter, Facebook and blogs to voice their displeasure with Google. In real-time.

I had the chance to speak to Ruth Speakman of Sony Europe on the sidelines of Social Media Influence where I posed the question: how did you get “social media” in your title and how is Sony Europe implementing this social discipline across such a vast organization? This is what she had to say:

Earlier this week we reported how Starbucks hit a new milestone in social media marketing, the first brand to surpass 10 million Facebook fans. A few weeks back I had the opportunity to interview Alexandra Wheeler, Starbucks’ director of digital strategies, on the sidelines of the Social Media Influence conference.

In 2006, as a guest of Deutsche Telekom, I saw an early round World Cup match pitting those two soccer powers: Togo against South Korea. In the last World Cup, held in Germany, …

In an open letter to the media, “Leroy Stick,” the nome de Tweet allegedly behind the viciously satirical BP Twitter feed, finally lets us in on the big gag

So says PepsiCo’s Frank Cooper III, chief consumer engagement officer, who tells marketers that traditional advertising methods are outdated and risk turning off your best customers. Instead, PepsiCo sees a new approach in letting customers talk, share, suggest, and even tell you where you could improve. It’s where fellow consumers can gain insight and make their purchase decisions. Cut this conversation off at your peril.

Hours after news broke of the April 20 Deepwater Horizon explosion, the first of the “boycott BP!” pleas could be found on Twitter, on random weekend eco-warrior blogs and here and there on Facebook. Now, the movement has snowballed into a social media cause célèbre, replete with Twitter flash protests, celebrity backing, damning homemade documentaries and satirical updates from an official-seeming company mouthpiece, the fastest growing account on Twitter. Where have we seen this all before? Yep, BP is facing its “Tehran moment,” with the anger of millions threatening to do irreparable damage. Can BP clean up the mess before it’s too late?

We may very well look back on yesterday’s Facebook privacy climb-down as a turning point in the very nature and function of social networks. Bowing to public pressure, the social networking heavyweight will introduce in the coming days new privacy guidelines that could very well lead to a whole lot less sharing of our private photos, videos, status updates and favorite links. And yet for such a landmark policy change, nobody seems to be happy with the changes.

The web’s eco warriors and carbon crusaders have really been sticking it to BP ever since the Deepwater spill began leaking barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico last month. Last week, Greenpeace invited the public to trash redesign the BP logo as part of its latest social media-inspired pressure campaign. Now, there’s another source of embarrassment for the Big Oil heavy, a Twitter-led crusader to undermine BP’s outreach efforts one Tweet at a time.