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.

Hollywood has defied the global recession, scoring impressive year-on-year box office gains while the rest of the media industry grapples with the uncertainty of getting the public to pay for content. How are the kings of the Silver Screen doing it? For starters, they pay a lot of attention to the little screen you’re squinting at.

Mike Schwede of Orange8 Interactive, whose work on the impact of the Nestlé-Greenpeace pressure campaign we’ve highlighted here before, has just published an in-depth social media brand analysis of troubled Big Oil heavy, BP. As Schwede points out, before the April 2oth Deepwater Horizon spill, BP critics were in the minority. The BP-bashing now dominates online discourse, and the bad blood appears to be going from bad to worse.

The battle for supremacy in the billion-dollar e-reader market keeps getting better and better. For us, anyhow. Now, the Kindle e-book reader is set on providing readers with a new social reading experience that–get this, Jane Austen fans–allows you to share book passages with your friends. Is that enough to silence the iPad buzz?

Who ever said there’s no such thing as a second chance? After a troubling financial year for theme-park operator Six Flags, the company is launching itself out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection with a major social media marketing boost. Creditors, can you say social gaming comeback?

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.

Bloggers and mainstream media have different agendas in covering a story, says a report by PewResearch. Okay, that much we knew. But how does this new citizen-led Watchdog dynamic impact companies with major brands in the public eye? The answer: corporate crisis PR may never be the same again.

Social media marketing may be all the rage in the world of marketing, but the bean counters are not impressed. This is the latest assessment from Razorfish in its annual report on the state of social media. We outline here a few ways to take advantage of this lag in the market and make social media a more cost-effective outreach component.

Farmville, Mafia Wars and YoVille have more than 100 million players combined, making the games creators, Zynga, the new force in gaming.