Surprise, customers are not very happy with their banks online, new comScore data shows. Where are they falling down? Customer service. So how then are the big retail banks using social media to bring answers to their sometimes frustrated account holders?

Which airline – British Airways, Easyjet or Virgin Atlantic – gets the highest marks from customers? What about Vodafone vs. T-Mobile? A new customer rating service, Pownum, has launched that tries to remove a bit of the mystery about which companies are the best do do business with.

Search engines handle well over 100 billion queries per month worldwide, and yet the experience of hunting down the relevant answer can still be such a frustration. For this reason, industry observers are now heralding social search, which promises to be more relevant and timely.

Remember Blippy, the social shopping service that works by sharing your credit card purchases with your friends and the wider Web community? It couldn’t work. Right? Well, in the past week a direct competitor, Swipely, came online in full force testing-mode to challenge Blippy.

JetBlue Airways launched a new online media campaign this morning making real customers the spokespeople for the airline’s commodious perq: extra leg-room. But while JetBlue usually gets high marks for its social media prowess, so far it’s looking like this new effort could have difficulty getting off the ground.

A recent comScore report suggests that brand loyalty declines in an economic recession. Obvious. Right? Well, looking at some interesting social media loyalty metrics, these findings might not be telling the whole story.

What do you do when your Facebook fan page falls into the hands of an angry mob? For starters, don’t lose your cool. Okay, then what?

What happens when you mess with the son of a marketing vet and self-described “industry disruptor”? For Boeing, it’s a social media backlash that continues to bring bad press critical of the company’s tin ear response to an eight-year-old with a fancy for sketching airplanes.

We’re pretty sure that Twitter has transformed before our very eyes over the last 12 months. Way back in, oh, May 2009 we followed a smallish group of friends, contacts and people whose opinions we respected so that we could enjoy a slice of their life and thoughts as expressed in nice 140 character digestible bites.

Twitter is optimizing the way we search for tweets and, more importantly for its future, giving companies fresh opportunities to advertise within a Twitter conversation stream.