It’s not everyday Goldman Sachs becomes the biggest social media story of the week. But that’s where the investment banking giant finds itself after a chief lieutenant quit and chose to publish a withering resignation letter in the newspaper on his last day on the job. You know the rest. The letter, published in The New York Times, detailed painfully a rip-off culture that preyed on “muppet” clients and profits at all costs. Naturally, the letter was the talk of Twitter.

If the recent Costa Concordia tragedy or McDonald’s #McFail hijacking have taught us anything, it’s that even savvy digital marketers can still get swamped by the social media-fueled crisis. That’s why we’ve produced another helpful tool to help you and your social media team adroitly navigate the lurking corporate crisis.

From a crisis communications perspective, Carnival Cruises, parent company of the stricken Costa Concordia Italian cruise ship, is in a precarious position. The company’s safety record is taking a tarring daily in the press and we may not yet have seen the worst: the ship could still sink further into the sea, creating an environmental hazard and adding further shock to the families of the missing. How then does the company respond to this? By offering survivors a 30% discount on future cruises! Cue: the hammering on Twitter.

What goes through the human mind when a crisis strikes? Panic? Meltdown? You’d be surprised. During moments of extreme adversity, well-prepared teams can do extraordinary things – identify the heart of the problem, devise a plan of attack and return the operation to “business as usual.” Veteran crisis communications trainer Neil Chapman offers us some key insights, starting with some lessons from a must-read book.

We live in an industry where it’s all too easy to criticise our peers. We’ve all got blogs, tweet away to our heart’s content and are opinionated. Normally I refrain, but today I thought I’d get a few thoughts down about how Vodafone handled communications around this morning’s service outage.

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?

In what is being hailed a victory for the world’s rainforests, Burger King has dropped Indonesian palm oil producer Sinar Mas from its list of suppliers, the third major brand to cave to a Greenpeace pressure campaign that’s been stalking the corporate pages of Facebook over the past six months.

You have to feel a bit sorry for the JetBlue Twitter team today. Their most popular ever employee, flight attendant Steven Slater a.k.a. “the greatest American hero,” may be free from jail, but the company is in no mood to celebrate. Instead, the airline is parrying aside public queries from the press and even the occasional stab at humor.

Jet Blue Airways flight attendant Steven Slater lost his rocker on the job yesterday after landing at New York’s JFK airport. After a dispute with a passenger, Slater swore at the passenger over the intercom, ?grabbed a beer, opened the side emergency door of the passenger jet and slid down the bouncy, inflatable slide for a memorable get-away. That was yesterday. Today, he’s an idol to a rabidly supportive Facebook following.

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.