This could be the toughest job yet in social media: running Goldman Sachs’ largely neglected social media communities. That’s right, the world’s most reviled investment bank – a.k.a. “the great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity” – is looking to hire a social media community manager. Interested?

I’ve been speaking to a lot to communications professionals lately about how to update their crisis communications strategy for the Twitter age. It’s true that social media has completely changed the game for crisis comms pros as now the crowd informs the crowd about how a disaster, natural or corporate-made, is likely to impact their community. But smart companies can use this technology as well to improve their communications strategy with the public. Here’s another reason why.

If you were to sum up the philosophy of spirits marketers in two words, surely, it would be: sex sells. Could social media change all that? If the Belvedere Vodka PR mess that erupted on Twitter and Facebook over the weekend is any indication, then the creative guys better figure out some new bright ideas to sell booze and spirits.

This week I was invited to chair a roundtable on the topic of green communications and, specifically, what the experience of McDonald’s recent McStories Twitter misadventure might tell us about social media sustainability communications.

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.

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.

Twitter has posted this evening an interesting chart graphing how long it took for the news of Whitney Houston’s death to hit escape velocity – the point where it traveled from an individual in Los Angeles to his network and then to the entire world. The answer? No more than two hours.

This is the third and final installment of our series with crisis communications expert Neil Chapman who led crisis communications for BP during the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010 and is now a senior associate at Wixted Pope Nora Thompson. Chapman gives us his view on how digital media (and particularly social) have transformed crisis communications strategy.

An interesting new ranking arrived in my in-box Thursday morning grading the most social-savvy FTSE 100 companies. In the top 10 were plenty of brands you’d expect – Marks and Spencer, Burberry, Unilever and Intercontinental Hotels. Also making the cut was Big Oil. Improbably, both BP and Royal Dutch Shell had cracked the top 6 of the FTSE 100 Social Media Index.