A meteoric rise in popularity for social media in recent years has companies scrambling to understand its impact on how they operate. For training and learning within large organisations, social media makes existing practices appear outdated. Clearly, equipping colleagues with the skills and insights to compete in a fast-changing global marketplace requires a step change in approach.

Rainforest Action Network is boasting today it successfully Punk’d Chevron in an elaborate “hacktivist” stunt that involved circulating fake press releases to the media and creating a fictitious Ad Age web story that portrayed the oil giant as repentant and ready to change. The ruse was timed to break hours before Chevron launched its own do-gooder ad campaign called “We Agree.” The tactic is dividing many. Do eco activists need to resort to untruths and masquerading as their nemesis in order to tell their story?

New research suggests perhaps they should. We’ve known for a while now that Facebook fans tend to be a brand’s most vocal consumers and biggest advocates (not to mention, critics) too. But are they more likely to buy? Indeed they are.

Online advertising continues to set new records, this time in the United States where the digital spend for the first half of 2010 exceeded $12.1 billion, reports the Internet Advertising Bureau. We reported earlier this month that in the UK spending on social media helped propel the total online ad spend. In the US, it was a different catalyst: online video.

Reuters’ latest vision of the transformative impact of social media holds lessons for not just big media, but big brands as well. Take a look.

Greenpeace New Zealand has gone on the offensive once again, this time against Fonterra, one of the world’s largest dairy companies, using Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to expose its alleged destruction of virgin rainforest to cultivate palm kernel. By our count, this is the fourth major brand Greenpeace has gone after in this way in the past seven months; others such as Burger King and Nestlé quickly felt the pressure and caved. Will Fonterra be next?

Here’s some inspiring news for low-budget filmmakers and cash-strapped brands looking to get noticed. A new effectiveness study of online video shows that user-generated videos are in many ways as effective as slickly produced TV commercials, news that would hardly surprise your typical YouTube addict. Could this spell the end of the expensive commercial shoot?

Surely, they fade into the ether, never to be heard from or seen again. Not so for the Old Spice “I’m on a horse” spot. It may have fallen off Advertising Age’s “Viral Chart” late last month, but it’s getting new life from impersonators: Sesame Street’s Grover and the Blendtec guys.

You’ve won. The Gap logo spat is over. In a contrite statement, Gap president Marka Hansen yesterday admitted the company goofed when it introduced a new logo last week without checking first with fans. The original logo – a blue box with “Gap” spelled out in white – stays, placating (for now) thousands of protesting bloggers, Tweeters and Facebook fans. It’s a lesson in customer relations that Frito-Lay is completely ignoring as it plans to shelve its eco-friendly bags of Sun Chips despite a similarly heated public outcry.

According to a recent Nielsen study, nine out of ten consumers trust their online peers more than marketers. Businesses are always looking carefully at their customer engagement strategies to distinguish their customer service from the competition, and never more than now with social media starting to have a major influence on consumer behavior.