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.

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.

Activists at Greenpeace have really stepped up their use of social media of late to recruit more and more members of the general public into its various corporate pressure campaigns. Just today, they’ve renewed the fight against BP in its ongoing stop- tar-sands-investment crusade by asking the general public to rebrand BP by redesigning the company’s corporate logo. So far, we’ve seen BP standing for “Bad People”, “Broken Promises” and “Bloody Pillagers”. And those are the tame ones.

Next month’s World Cup has long been hyped as the first “Social Media World Cup,” a moniker that doesn’t quite fit. One sponsor, Yahoo, this week outlined its World Cup plans, replete with fantasy games …