McDonald’s kicked things off on Thursday with the hashtag #MeetTheFarmers, in a campaign meant to draw attention to the brand’s guarantee of fresh produce.

Later in the day, however, the burger company used a dangerously vague hashtag #McDstories which people used negatively.

The Daily Mail gathered some of the replies:

Learn more and view an infographic on the making of this at digitalbuzzblog.

The reason for the push is that the pharmacy chain was unable to come to terms with former pharmacy benefit manager, Express Scripts, and fears losing customers to Wal-Mart and CVS, both of which still have relationships with the company, says AdAge.

Along with promoted tweets it also paid Twitter to feature “#ILoveWalgreens” as a promoted trend.

Not only that, Walgreens hired Social Spark, a company that matches bloggers with advertisers for a percentage of the fee, to get some mommy bloggers writing about the issue in hopes of turning the tide in its favor.

Read more on how Walgreens is using paid social media at socialcommercetoday.

Malaysia Airlines, through a Facebook app called MHBuddy, takes the concern of sitting next to a stranger off the tray table by not only allowing passengers to book airfare, but arrange flights with friends in tow. In fact, the app lets passengers perform several useful functions:

- Book flights with friends and check in directly on Facebook
- See the picture and seat number of friends traveling on the same flight
- Meet up with friends who will be in the same city where passengers are traveling
- Find friends who live in the destination city and let them know arrival times

If the following infographic is any indication, it appears that a number of major airlines have embraced social media wholeheartedly.

View the full infographic and more details on how airlines are using social commerce at socialcommercetoday.

Virgin America was built to be social.  Their Executives are social and Virgin Companies are social. If you ever considered what an airline would look like if designed from the ground up to be social, it’s Virgin America.

“The whole point behind the airline was really to try to reinvent the domestic travel experience and make it better and make it more focused around our guests,” said Abby Lunardini, Director of Corporate Communications at Virgin America, “and from the beginning, our teammates were really active in the social media space, which helped support that goal.”

Read more details on how Virgin America is using social and what your brand can learn from it at businessinsider.

The Oreo Facebook page also includes:

- A moments gallery, in which fans can share their photos, videos, and stories about the cookie

- Say it with Oreo, which allows fans to post messages with cookie graphics on their friends’ walls

- Links to the brand’s commercials and recipes.

Read more details on how Oreo is engaging Facebook fans at allfacebook.

After finding a Facebook group with almost 100,000 people called “I Wanna Have A Sleepover In Ikea“… IKEA themselves created a competition for their Facebook Fans to be part of a giant sleepover at the Essex IKEA store for 100 people.  The video above displays what when on at this event.

View more details on this Facebook Fanpage sleepover at digitalbuzz.

TOP 5 Brands:

1. YouTube (48 million likes)

2. MTV (29 million)

3. Coca-Cola (36 million)

4. Starbucks (26 million)

5. Disney (29 million)

Rankings were based on: fan count, their momentum (how quickly they’ve been acquiring fans), fan engagement and emotional quality.

Starbucks, while it trails Coca-Cola by 10 million fans, is behind by only one point, thanks to superior engagement and sentiment for the company. Likewise, the java giant beats Disney by two points.

Further down the ranking, Kohl’s  is a respectable No. 31 on the list, thanks largely to coming in first among all brands on Facebook in fan emotional sentiment. Kohl’s actually over-indexes on all emotional scales — including frustration and hate — compared with other brands on Facebook, but fans show it the love by a significant margin.

Read the full list and more details from this study at adage.

It shows a FedEx delivery person tossing a computer monitor over a fence. Thus far, it’s grabbed more than 4.5 million views on YouTube.

Bad news for FedEx—particularly its PR team, who are most likely working to put the situation to rest.

In an attempt to squelch the emerging firestorm, FedEx took to social media, issuing a series of tweets and a blog post in which it explains that the company apologized to the the customer who received the monitor and made good.

Read more details on how FedEx resolved this issue through social media at PRdaily.

But despite that early start in what’s become such a hot arena, the No. 1 online seller for years had lagged in social media, many observers griped, failing to use Facebook and Twitter to engage consumers.

That’s changed. Amazon’s Facebook account is fast-growing, and observers say Amazon has greatly boosted its use of social media.

Observers say the turning point came in July 2010, when Amazon integrated its site with Facebook to create what it calls the Amazon/Facebook shopping experience. Users of the www.facebook.com/Amazon site can, for example, see a list of their friends’ birthdays and interests … along with some helpful gift suggestions from amazon.com. Site users also can also take advantage of Amazon’s Gold Box daily deals, which offer a limited number of discounts on a first-come, first-served basis.

Read more on Amazon’s social media strategy at investors.