Time and time again, that traditional marketer and PR mentality — dominated by the desire to create an impressive, big bang of a campaign without really thinking how it’s going to play out in real time and in an online world where everyone talks back — lets brands and agencies down.

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.

The numbers are trending nicely for social media. A new piece of research out this week estimates the global social network ad spend will top $8 billion next year and approach $10 billion the year after. There’s another social media figure on the rise too: despite the increased investment in social, companies are getting blindsided by the social media-fueled PR crisis, as our recent research into this shows. Here then are a few important tips to consider for integrating social media into your crisis communications plan.

Greenpeace is up against the bad boys again, this time with the help of an online campaign that, in a break from the past, is mysterious and stealthy. For now.

Greenpeace is stalking another corporate baddy, using Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to amass a virtual resistance of over 600,000 signatures to pressure the polluter to cease-and-desist its carbon-heavy ways. Numbers-wise, this may be Greenpeace’s most successful social media pressure campaign yet. The problem is its target: the extremely like-able Facebook.

Our editorial and social media training partner, Custom Communication, has gone back through six years of social media and compiled a visual narrative of company misadventures with bloggers, tweeter and other social media voices.

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.

BP petrol retailers are making a very slow recovery, as the rate of growth in the BP Boycott movement levels off, reports The New York Times. Whereas revenues were down about 30% at the start of the spill, the decline in sales is now around 5% for retailers across the US. With the oil well cap just about sealed and the worst apparently over, has the online Boycott BP movement mirrored the decline in business?

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.