Alexandra Wheeler, Digital Director for Starbucks will be speaking at the Social Media Influence conference on June 22. Here we look at how Starbucks’ new free WiFi initiative can be traced back to a fresh dedication to online customer engagement.

America’s iPhone users, already unhappy with the AT&T monopoly, are seething again today about botched pre-orders for the new iPhone 4, hobbled as it was by AT&T network failures. Customers, as they are wont to do these days, took to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogs to fire hate bombs at the mobile carrier. AT&T handled many of the complaints with aplomb on Twitter, but left whole other social media channels quiet. Not surprisingly, the angry bursts are being fired again.

If you’re an avid Twitter user (wait, you’re not on Twitter yet!?), then you’ve certainly seen the dreaded “Twitter over capacity” whale a few times in the last week or so. Confronted with the fail whale many times this week ourselves we too have grumbled to the Twitter gods: WTF is going on? The Twitter gods, well, PR guy, has finally answered.

Social media channels are becoming a necessity for successful online sales performance as they are increasingly the first place shoppers turn for advice, two newly released reports by eMarketer and Nielsen show. In sum, a growing number of customers depend on Facebook and Twitter for their first impression of a brand, and many online shoppers won’t buy without a social shopping recommendation.

Procter & Gamble, facing a social media-fueled fire that is starting to burn, is now budgeting emergency marketing funds, the Wall Street Journal reports today, to extinguish the furore over its Pampers Dry Max diaper brand. A month after mommy bloggers started hounding P&G on popular social media sites, the criticism continues with moms complaining the new diapers lead to rashes and are prone to leaks. Will P&G’s new marketing moves be enough to avoid a nasty PR burn?

We have a serious case of World Cup fever here. Before the tournament was underway, we put together our World Cup Sponsor Social Media Guide, tipping which big brand we though had a chance to score the most points with fans. Today, we are delivering our first of many reports on how these big brands are faring. The first installment here is a league table of the 14 Fifa World Cup partners and sponsors, ranked by social media following. We’ll update this every Monday until the end of the tourney in the hopes of answering: do the hefty World Cup sponsorship investments actually pay off?

Can social media spring-cleaning be a good thing? Coca-Cola in the UK, it is reported, is slashing the number of official websites for its brands in order to streamline consumers’ social media experience. This raises the questions: Can too much online presence for a brand make for a clunky and confusing user experience? And, is it ever okay for a brand to decide where its fans should hang out online?

With potential shoppers browsing for tips on the hottest new styles, online clothing retailers are actively trying to boost their social media followers and, naturally, sales. Which online retailers are making the most use of …

Online clothing retailer ASOS, super popular with the twenty-something Facebook generation, is the Zappos of Europe, building a massively loyal online community around its latest fashions. This social-savvy formula appears to be making even the company bean-counters happy, as the dot-com reported this week a fat profit and double-digit sales growth in an otherwise tough retail market. Always curious about the connection of community-building and its impact on sales, we take a look here at the relationship between its social media investment and its impact on the top line.

In this age of Twitter storms and blog swarms, crisis communications experts are being forced to rethink how to defuse what we like to call the “long tail” effect of nasty buzz. BP is experiencing an online and offline reputation disaster but in social media it has fallen prey to what we call the “sting in the long tail effect”.