A month ago, we published an in-depth look at the nascent but booming social media jobs sector in a report called The State of Social Media Jobs 2010. I mention it here because one of the stark findings of the report was that many of the world’s largest companies, we found, continue to display a reluctance to appointing social media executives from within the marketing/sales/communications ranks. One major exception to this is Sony Europe, which believes social media spans the disciplines of PR, traditional and digital marketing and sales and has a vital role within the company.

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.

She spoke of the profound importance to get buy-in from the top level of the organization (in the case of Starbucks, that comes from founder Howard Schultz) in order to implement not just a successful social media strategy, but a philosophy. There’s a big difference. Hear for yourself:

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, Togo was the side with the longest odds, this year’s North Korea. The big exception was that Team Togo, seeking to exploit a rare moment of negotiating leverage, decided to use the power of the most followed sports event on the planet to threaten a match boycott in the name of recouping unpaid wages, something even Kim Jong Il’s boys wouldn’t dare try.

Togo lost 2-1 that day, but they eventually got paid.

The other memorable thing about that game was the heat. With the midday sun blazing and temps in the mid-90s, my gracious Teutonic hosts abandoned any attempt to show me the geeky stuff–i.e., how they wired up the stadium. The sacrifice was not lost on me; if it’s one thing techy Germans like to show off, it’s their engineering prowess. Instead, we went looking for cold beers and shade. We found the latter inside the stadium. There was a problem with the beer though, my apologetic hosts informed me; all they sell on match day at the stadium is Budweiser, the World Cup beer sponsor. If there’s one thing Germans are more proud of than their engineering prowess, it’s their local “bier.” We drank our cold Buds, longingly discussing the  “bier” brands we wish we were drinking instead and plotting which bar to hit in town once the match ended.

Four years on and the Germans (among others) still haven’t forgotten the indignity of being forced to drink Budweiser at a football match. “When Germany hosted the World Cup in 2006, the country was awash in fuzzy feel-good patriotism. Only one thing threatened to ruin the party—crappy American beer,” The Local, a German English-language news site recalls. Readers of South Africa’s Mail & Guardian, meanwhile, refer to Bud as “Blatter Beer”.

The distasteful cracks don’t end there. Budweiser has also been the victim of the biggest ambush marketing stunt so far at this year’s World Cup when the Dutch brewer, Bavaria, paid a group of cute blondes to take in the Netherlands-Denmark match decked out in bright orange mini skirts. The sight of babes in tight dresses doing “the wave” was of course caught on camera. Several times. Some of the masterminds were arrested for breaking Fifa rules; that is, jeopardizing the $1.2 billion the organizers pull in from the likes of Budweiser to sponsor the World Cup. Cue: outraged European newspaper columnists.

With all this ill-will swirling around an “American” beer brand sponsoring a very non-American game, you might be tempted to nod in wonder why Anheuser-Busch InBev, despite its new Belgian owners, would bother with the massive investment. Sure, it’s trying to make in-roads in the overseas market, but is all the grief worth it?

I think it is. Here’s why: at Social Media Influence, we’ve been following how the World Cup sponsors are exploiting this massive investment to boost brand visibility and to build a more meaningful social media following, one that will stick around long after a new winner is crowned. To be sure, it’s not the perfect ROI measuring stick, but it’s one worth exploring as it sheds light on an old marketing question: can big-ticket sports sponsorships create more lasting brand loyalty?

In the first week of the 2010 World Cup, the big winner was Coca-Cola, gaining an impressive 169,000 followers, thanks to the popularity of its YouTube-inspired “Longest Celebration” contest. Coke tried to goose these numbers further with a Twitter ad buy, but not so. The big winner this past week was, gulp, Budweiser. Its “Bud United” campaign has proven to be a major social media hit, good enough to net an impressive 608,000 followers in the last week.

In terms of new footy followers, Budweiser is even beating out Adidas, a proud German brand, during this World Cup.

He speaks.

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, explaining why he hijacked the oil giant’s brand in recent weeks. Why? Because he could.

I started @BPGlobalPR, because the oil spill had been going on for almost a month and all BP had to offer were bullshit PR statements. No solutions, no urgency, no sincerity, no nothing. That’s why I decided to relate to the public for them. I started off just making jokes at their expense with a few friends, but now it has turned into something of a movement. As I write this, we have 100,000 followers and counting. People are sharing billboards, music, graphic art, videos and most importantly information.

But while he clues us in on his motivation, we still don’t know much about who he is, robbing us of the full unmasking that the tech media has been craving in recent days. From the tone of the letter, “Leroy Stick” sounds more like an unemployed MBA than a hippy eco-warrior. The point of the whole brand-jacking masquerade, he tells us, was to punish BP for being so inauthentic and clumsy in its crisis PR response. Huh? Where is the concern for the dead pelicans, the devastation to the livelihood of the local fishermen, the ruination of Memorial Day weekend at the beach? More curiously, he concludes with the kind of call-to-arms you might hear at an Association of National Advertisers conference: He wants us to re-brand BP.

“Re-branding,” he reminds us, “doesn’t work if we don’t let it, so let’s hold BP’s feet to the fire. Let’s make them own up to and fix their mistakes NOW and most importantly, let’s make sure we don’t let them do this again.”

“Right now,” he continues, “PR is all about brand protection. All I’m suggesting is that we use that energy to work on human progression. Until then, I guess we’ve still got jokes.”

Am I the only one who wished he just stuck with the jokes? The “Leroy Stick” manifesto has Ad Age readers doing a bit of soul-searching, but I was hoping for something, I don’t know, bigger, something that goes beyond a message of branding, re-banding and the proper crisis management response. This will end up being the most devastating ecological catastrophe of our lifetime, after all. (Yes, I realize, I’m being a bit hypocritical here; many of my C-Tweet columns chide companies for their poor response to the public).

There is one very positive thing that “Leroy Stick” (if it really is “Leroy Stick” behind this BP parody) has done for us. Earlier this week I got a good chuckle over the latest @BPGlobalPR copycats: the savage @IsraelGlobalPR and @HamasGlobalPR feeds, both launched in the hours after Monday’s aid flotilla attack well out at sea somewhere off the coast of Gaza. Both feeds are at times obnoxious and offensive. But they work (in the humor category) because the surprising frankness of the delivery is so refreshing. It’s what we’d like to see more of from our elected officials, or from company execs for that matter. (Okay, maybe not Tweets like this one from the fictitious Hamas team: “Stupid israel, do u actually think we want turkish goods (& worse turks)? the italian ship, different story #gaza #flotilla,” but you get the idea.)

I’ve said in this space before that Twitter works so well as a communications medium because it’s so hard to insert PR fluff into a 140-character message. Twitter demands clarity and sincerity, the kind of qualities we’d like to see in all corporate and government communiques. There’s another thing Twitter offers: the ability to lampoon those who too frequently ignore those qualities. For them, to paraphrase a great marketing mind, “we’ve still go jokes.”

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.

Cooper’s latest call-to-arms is part of a column he wrote for The Huffington Post. He puts it bluntly that a more social approach to marketing is a more profitable approach:

At PepsiCo, we found that our consumers’ social relationships serve as the foundation for our most effective marketing. Once you engage your loyal consumers to help lead the evolution of your brand or products, those consumers communicate authentically within their real-life social networks about the meaning of your brands and the reasons others should love them too. The collaboration and innovation led by consumers will lead to word-of-mouth communications, which can influence revenue and profit.

PepsiCo has been something of a rebel pushing fellow marketers to adopt social media, not just as a bolt-on advertising channel, but as a philosophy to build a more responsive, nimble company. In February, Cooper chastised his peers, imploring them not to talk down to customers, but rather to engage them, challenge them.

To be sure, PepsiCo is walking the walk on this. A number of PepsiCo brands have been using social media extensively in their their outreach marketing: Doritos, with user-generated commercials on their YouTube channel; Mountain Dew, with their Dewmocracy “campaign”; and Pepsi’s own Pepsi Refresh project, essentially a contest for who can come up with the best idea that “will have a positive impact” on the planet.

PepsiCo’s Bonin Bough told us earlier this year that even though the Refresh Project has been called the biggest ever social media campaign of its kind, he bristles at these words. “The Refresh Project is not a social media project,” Bough, global director of digital and social media at PepsiCo, said. “Social media happens to be one of the communication channels at the heart of this social engagement effort. It is the mechanism we are using to demonstrate the power of the individual, and individual ideas.”

Editor’s Note: PepsiCo’s B. Bonin Bough will be speaking at the Social Media Conference, June 22. Join our LinkedIn Group today and qualify for a nice discount.

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?

Let’s take a look at the multi-front reputation-wrecking assault BP faces at the moment from various social media channels.

Facebook: As of this morning, the primary (there are 293 of them) Boycott BP Facebook page had a following of greater than 172,000, a gain of 54,000 since CNN reported its existence two days ago. The primary page has become a massive community Wiki tallying the number of dead turtles and pelicans. It’s also a place for cathartic venting. One of the more reserved charges, reads:

“Disgusting death mongers! BP’s CEOs should be forced to get out there and clean up the oil with their bare hands!! :<”

Twitter: #BP has been a trending topic on Twitter for weeks now. But the tone is growing nastier, shifting from OMG!-the-spill-is-out-of-control tweets to plans for street-level activism such as flash protests at BP filling stations around the U.S. Here’s an indication of what BP is facing:

This chart above tallying “BP protest” tweets shows a type of “snowball effect” growing in recent days, the result of a recent spate of news stories that detail the Boycott BP campaigns occurring on Twitter, on Facebook and on blogs. The news articles are then re-Tweeted, re-posted to Facebook status updates and published on still more blogs, creating an amplification effect that will be hard to counter from a PR standpoint. Journalists can now dip into this story whenever they want, using fresh numbers and fresh outrage to put a new slant on an old story.

YouTube: Over 6,000 videos have been posted to YouTube in the last month detailing the extent of the environmental damage by the Deepwater spill, reaching millions of viewers. The videos run the gamut from crude satire to the conspiratorial to community outrage.

Any hope for BP? BP’s PR crisis management task force should note: there is precedent here. Last June, a global community of outraged voices took to the Internet to demand change in the form of the infamous #iranelection protests. For two weeks, protesters, aided by a globe-spanning social media support group, defied President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s armed goons, circumvented government censors and communications blackouts, to voice their opposition to a dodgy election. Then, one day, the momentum behind the Iranian protest lost steam and fell out of the public consciousness, replaced by an even bigger story.

What event could have been so big as to distract us from the potential toppling of a despotic regime? It was the death of Michael Jackson, considered at the time the most tweeted single news event ever. This is the nature of online protests: they come out of nowhere and have the potential to captivate and sway the masses, only to fade from view just as quickly when the next big thing comes along. BP’s crack PR team understands this full well, but that’s little comfort. The King of Pop is dead, and so too are a lot of sea turtles and pelicans.

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.

Here’s what went down yesterday at Facebook HQ in Palo Alto: In summary, Facebook will introduce in the coming days and weeks a whole new set of rules regarding our privacy controls, including the introduction of a simplified “master control” allowing its 400 million-plus users to simply pick and choose precisely with whom they want to see their photos, witty remarks and web links. And yet, the changes still don’t go far enough.

Consider these responses to the changes:

• A Wall Street Journal poll (306 respondents as of now) finds that 72.9% feel the new changes do not go far enough.
• A whopping 93% of the 605 people polled by British online security specialists Sophos said they would prefer Facebook privacy settings be “opt-in.”
• Roughly 70% of the 5,186 readers polled by Mashable said they have or plan to commit an act of Facebook suicide. Why? The most often cited reason for leaving is that they no longer trust Facebook with their personal data.
• Facebook members have created over 1,000 groups in the past two years demanding tighter privacy controls.
• Why all the fuss? As the New York Times explained in a neat, but creepy graph: “To manage your privacy on Facebook, you will need to navigate through 50 settings with more than 170 options.” And at the end you’re still not quite certain who will see your pics, videos and status updates.

Even in announcing the changes, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg reiterates his belief that people fundamentally have a desire to share. He speaks of the s-word as a great liberating force. “When you share more, the world becomes more open and connected,” he writes.

Who could disagree with such a notion? Well, for starters, regulators. There is a legal showdown before the F.T.C. and the European Commission, waving the EU-wide Privacy Directive, is demanding better protections for European users.

In clinging to this notion of sharing = a better more profitable world, Zuckerberg at the moment is exposed as a radical, a dangerous one at that. Under the current (expiring) regime, he is on a collision course with regulators in the U.S. and abroad.

The irony is that Zuckerberg has probably done more good for advancing the personal privacy debate than any other figure in the business world. Because of Facebook even teenagers now understand and value the occasional anonymity of being just a teenager. This generation also understands the value of personal expression and random inter-connectedness. There is a balance of course, but it’s not reflected in our current laws. And so the feeling of zero personal control as exemplified by the Old (or soon-to-be “Old”) Facebook will now shift to a reactionary sharing-is-dangerous mentality. We’ll swing back and forth until the laws catch up with societal norms. But in the meantime, there will be a lot less sharing.

I hope this back-and-forth doesn’t impact Zuckerberg’s dream of an “open and connected world.” That sounds like a place I’d like to live.

The web’s eco-warriors and carbon crusaders have really been sticking it to BP ever since the Deepwater Horizon spill began leaking barrels and barrels of raw 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.As the Wall Street Journal reports today, the Twitter feed @BPGlobalPR, which masquerades – in name only – as that of an official BP public relations mouthpiece, is blasting out messages that are really getting under people’s skins. One reads:

“If we had a dollar for every complaint about this oil spill, it wouldn’t compare to our current fortune. Oil is a lucrative industry!”

The problem for the embattled oil giant is that many people believe the satirically arrogant Tweets are coming from BP itself. You might forgive the duped as the feed described itself as, “This page exists to get BP’s message and mission statement out into the twitterverse!”

The other major problem is that the fake BP Twitter account now has over 18,000 followers (the WSJ reports 11,400 as it’s story went to press overnight, showing its meteoric rise in the past few hours), not bad for an account that was launched on May 19th. Meanwhile, BP’s official Twitter feed – @BP_America – and a second to coordinate clean-up news – @Oil_Spill_2010 (could you have possibly come up with a more unnerving handle? Will there be an @Oil_Spill_2011 next year?) – which are meant to counteract all the bad publicity and deliver timely updates on the clean-up, have about half the number of followers and are quickly getting buried by the satirical Tweeters as the chart here shows:

The appeal of the fake BP Twitter feed is easy to see. It taps into the public’s outrage by conjuring up a BP brand persona that is arrogant and uncaring, a stark difference, mind you, from the image BP is trying to put across on its official Twitter feed. Case in point: While BP is Tweeting that volunteers are pitching in to protect the coastline we see these incongruous Tweets, the last messages you’d expect to see from a firm in the middle of a lengthy PR crisis:

What we cannot understand is why BP is allowing someone to completely hijack its message. What could it have done better? Well, for starters, it could have had its Twitter accounts “verified” so the public would know at least that its own Tweets are legit and that others are not to be trusted. And BP has done nothing that we can see to distance itself from the fake Tweeter. Not a single alert to say don’t trust the person behind the @BPGlobalPR curtain.

Maybe BP really doesn’t care.

Correction: In a previous version of this story, I misstated that @Oil_Spill_2010 was an official BP Twitter PR feed, when, in fact, it was set up by the federal agencies involved in the clean-up, a feed that, at times, includes BP’s response. We regret the error.

Editor’s Note: Want to learn more about social media best practice? Join our LinkedIn Group and enjoy a great discount on attending the Social Media Conference, June 22.

Farmville, Mafia Wars and YoVille have more than 100 million players combined, making the games creators, Zynga, the new force in gaming. Last week, Zynga demonstrated its new clout, cutting a better-than-expected five-year deal to remain exclusively on Facebook. As an encore, Zynga struck a major in-store summer promotion with the 7-Eleven chain of convenience stores that span across much of the U.S. and Canada marking its ascendancy as a new pop culture brand to be reckoned with.So if you’re in a 7-Eleven store this summer you’ll see Farmville characters on Slurpee drink cups and on cartons of ice cream and hot dog wrappers. These purchases will come with special codes that can then be redeemed for virtual goods, opening up a new page in retail promotions: the exchange of actual goods for virtual ones. What kind of goods, you wonder? Well, if you buy a carton of ice cream at 7-Eleven you qualify for a Farmville cow.

Evidently, a lot of thought went into matching actual purchases with virtual goods. As Adweek explains:

The companies have matched up items with the games they think fit most. The male-heavy audience for Mafia Wars can get codes on hot dogs, wings and chips while female-skewing FarmVille is targeted with offers for fresh fruit, bottled water and sandwiches.

Frankly, we’ve been wondering for some time when Zynga (or Facebook for that matter) would move into the world of mainstream brand tie-ins. The games developer been working with 7-Eleven since the autumn, but we could see even bigger possible promotions. Think of a Coke-branded teddy bear for Valentine’s Day or Red Bull sponsoring a hit job on Mafia Wars.

We hold out hope.

Editor’s Note: Want to learn more about social media best practice? Join our LinkedIn Group and enjoy a great discount on attending the Social Media Conference, June 22.

Shop much at 6pm.com, the web retailer owned by Amazon.com? The site made a collossal mistake over the weekend, pricing all items at $49.99, a blunder that it says cost it $1.6 million. People will be talking about this mishap for some time, but not because it lost a bundle, but rather because it’s generated so much praise from the web community for honoring every transaction at the mistaken knock-down price, even, reportedly, a $1,400 GPS system.

To be sure, pricing mishaps happen from time-to-time with online retailers. But they don’t always honor the deal. Instead, they blame the error on a software glitch and cancel the order, enraging unforgiving customers. But 6pm.com, founded by Zappos.com, now part of Amazon.com, decided to eat the loss and turn the mishap into a wave of goodwill. Just look at the surge in Twitter followers it gained since news broke of its mishap late on Friday.

Why is this a big deal? 6pm.com is a direct-sales specialist that regularly publicizes bargains and deals via Twitter daily. This graph measures potential customers.

There are plenty of people this morning questioning the authenticity of this story, wondering if this is merely a marketing gimmick to raise the retailer’s profile. Perhaps so, but so what?!? It’s shown bravery, humility and transparency in its handling of this mishap. And the wider web community has taken notice and approves.

Editor’s Note: Want to learn more about social media best practice? Join our LinkedIn Group and enjoy a great discount on attending the Social Media Conference, June 22.