Mere hours after Muammar Gaddafi was killed in southern Libya last week, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), Admiral James Stavridis took to his Twitter feed and to his Facebook page to announce an end to military operations. People from around the world used the forum to thank him personally for NATO’s efforts in ousting Libya’s strong man. Another 43 re-Tweeted the message. As of the time of writing it was “Liked” 269 times and shared another 146 times. To the victor goes the Tweets, I guess.

Major companies and organizations are investing in social media monitoring to protect their brand’s reputation. After all, nobody wants a customer gripe to go unnoticed and turn into a viral PR nightmare. It’s sound planning, a smart investment. But social media monitoring software is no panacea. Reputation monitoring, or e-reputation if you will, very much requires the human touch.

I’ve only twice ever turned to Twitter to clear up a vexing customer service glitch. The results were deeply gratifying: I got a helpful response in a fairly timely manner resolving my ongoing feuds problems with Groupon Italia and Bank of America. Turns out I’m not alone in thinking this is the future of attentive customer service, as new research shows.

I was recently asked by a very frustrated marketer why it was that sometimes she could spend half her morning coming up with a post idea, writing it, and then despairing afterwards when nobody commented on it or clicked “Like.” Equally baffling, some of her breeziest posts were getting a great response.

Coca-Cola has ranked at or near the top in just about every measure of social engagement for some time now. It is the Lady Gaga of brands. How does it manage to keep its 34 million-plus fans sated on a daily basis? An interesting new piece of research offers some insights.

For the past year or so, all the buzz was about growing your follower numbers. But today there are doubts about whether that’s such a good investment. Why? Marketers are finding that their swelling Facebook fan communities and Twitter followings are increasingly not “target-specific” and too damn fickle.

Not long ago, all the talk in digital marketing circles was the power of “Like.” Build an impressive following of people who declare they like your company, organization or product and, the thinking went, you’d have a cheap and cheerful network of brand advocates, the type who would enthusiastically follow your daily posts and tell their friends about it, too. How very naive that all seems today.

One of the wackier stories of the week involves Alessio Rastani, a self-described independent trader who went on the BBC and told an incredulous interviewer that the euro is dead, the stock market is finished and that he dreams “of another recession,” the perfect scenario to cash in BIG. Such candor is rare from City traders and so within hours the video was trending on Twitter and was being passed from friend-to-friend on Facebook.

It’s not often that Nature weighs in on innovations in social media – let alone the much maligned field of sentiment analysis software – so when I saw this headline I had to take a closer look: “News mining might have predicted Arab Spring.”

We’re beginning to see the downside of the social media land rush mentality that compelled big brands, organizations and corporates to set up shop on the likes of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Foursquare over the past two years. A much-cited new survey tells us that companies are being increasingly hit with a new type of reputation-bruising crisis, one that emerges and spreads via social media channels. Social crises are on the rise and companies are increasingly unprepared to resolve them.