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.

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.

The publication yesterday of the bombshell “Why I left Goldman Sachs” resignation letter left company brass in New York completely unprepared for the global fire storm of chatter that it’s stirred. To be sure, Goldman, a notoriously anti-social company, has taken a huge hit to its reputation – not to mention a $2.2 billion haircut off its market cap – that will be tough to buff clean any time soon.

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.

We started the week with a big Facebook #Fail from Coca-Cola Down Under and things didn’t get much better as we all tuned in for the big tech news of the week – the details of the new iPad. To recap, Coca-Cola Australia figured it would be a fun idea to ask its 736,000 Facebook fans to participate in a type of word-association game that quickly spiraled into a fan-on-fan insult-fest. It was yet another lesson (as if we needed reminding) that in social media, brands have little to no control over what fans will ultimately say.

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.