That’s the good, albeit brutal, news. The bad news though is that as recently as 2010, half of all large organizations were still blocking employee access to social media sites in the name of security, a new Gartner study says. The number of social-censoring enterprises is falling, but those who hang on in lock-down mode are actually creating a different type of security risk

As you can see from this handy, little graphic to my left, many of the world’s largest and social-savvy brands continue to fall foul of the social media screw-up. Or, looked at another way, corporate screw-ups are going social at an escalating pace. Just ask McDonald’s, Unilever, FedEx and Carnival Cruises, to name just a few.

Dutch airline KLM has introduced a helpful new service – ‘Meet and Seat’ – that allows passengers to share information from their Facebook and LinkedIn profiles with other flyers, and thereby choose a seatmate accordingly. Users can edit their profile and photo, and have from 90 days to 48 hours before departure to choose a flying friend (or find a better one – ouch)

If you pop onto Coca-Cola Australia’s Facebook page, you’ll get a nice glimpse of a social media marketing experiment gone awry. On Tuesday, the brand figured it would be a fun idea to ask the 736,000-plus Coke fans Down Under on Facebook to participate in a type of word-association game that quickly spiraled into the kind of humor you’d see scribbled on the wall of a toilet stall in a biker bar.

The humanization of marketing is one of the more positive, aspirational aspects of social media marketing. But this is a concept that goes well beyond friending, f-commerce and Likes. It’s also about accountability and transparency, a few very human traits.

As the general consensus towards f-commerce slips further into pessimism, online retailers determined to see it through will need to come up with increasingly clever ways to capture the imaginations of potential customers. As of today, and for the next three weeks, Tesco is doing exactly that, with an innovative Facebook application that will allow shoppers to ‘try on’ its clothing range from the comfort of their own homes

Here’s the second part of our Q&A with Storeya, a Facebook commerce specialist who shares with us the formula for turning fans into shoppers.

We’ve written about the doubts now lingering over Facebook retail, or F-commerce, in light of the highly visible closures of shops on the social network by big retailers such as Gamestop and The Gap. To get the other side of the story we’ve asked F-commerce enabler Storeya to describe what it’s seeing in the market. Not surprisingly, Storya tells us F-commerce is alive and well.

With the social networking ad market expected to top $7.7 billion this year, Buddy Media is aggressively staking out its slice of the pie, announcing today the acquisition of London-based Brighter Option, a Facebook ad serving specialist. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Cross-channel train service Eurostar claims it’s the first advertiser to integrate real time social media with large-scale advertising in a new initiative – ‘Eurostar Live’ – which will see Facebook and Twitter comments and pictures projected from 363 digital screens across London.