At some point, back-peddling is no longer a viable damage control option. We’d say that point comes somewhere between screaming obscenities in all caps at critics via Facebook, and hurling vague threats while claiming to be a superhero backed by God himself.

Yeah, that happened.

After Gordon Ramsay of reality show “Kitchen Nightmares” declared Arizona restaurant Amy’s Baking Company Bakery Boutique & Bistro so horrible that even he couldn’t help the owners rescue their establishment, those owners, Amy and Sammy, took to social media to bite back at critics. Here are a few of the most…um…interesting Facebook posts (if you’re offended by the F word, you should probably stop reading):

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Every brand on Earth is chomping at the bit to place official ads on the rapidly growing Instagram, but parent company Facebook continues to proceed with extreme caution.

While Mark Zuckerberg says he is very encouraged by the expansion of the image-sharing network, he clearly does not plan to open the commercial floodgates until he’s good and ready. In his own words, Instagram must first focus on “build[ing] community” before determining how best to use its considerable potential as an ad/marketing forum. We can see why Zuckerberg prefers to take low-risk baby steps, no matter how impatient advertisers may be.

In the meantime, brands and their social media teams should be quite happy to learn that they do have more promotional options on Instagram thanks to the newly introduced function “photos of you,” which allows users to tag any other existing account—be it a friend, a celebrity, a local business, or a big-name brand—in their own pics. Amateur lensmen and brand managers alike will receive notifications when others tag them, and they can then choose whether to display these images on their own public feeds.

Can you say “pre-approved user generated content?”

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Ever feel like you’re living in The Truman Show and every ad you see is geared directly at you? While we know that this is becoming more and more true with targeted online ads, it still never fails to freak me out when I am merrily going about my business, and suddenly the promoted tweet at the top of my feed is for something I desperately need at that very moment.

As a lifelong migraine-sufferer, a recent tweet from Excedrin had me looking over my shoulder for the candid camera.

Knowing I had a headache coming on, I decided to get all of my computer-related work out of the way. When I logged into Twitter, the first thing I saw was this:

Vote for “Who Deserves Excedrin the Most?” Sweepstakes on Facebook and enter to win great prizes. Rules apply. #WDETM on.fb.me/YkP8hD

— Excedrin® (@Excedrin) April 17, 2013

“Me,” I thought, “done deal.” But then, in my migraine-induced half-conscious brain fog, I began to over-analyze Excedrin’s question. Why vote for who is most deserving? Sweet merciful heaven, is there a shortage and this is their way of rationing? Or, even worse, is this some sort of Joker-style social experiment to expose the dark underbelly of our society that would label certain people undeserving of pain relief? Fortunately, it was at this point that the rational, as-of-yet-unaffected-by-migraine part of my brain told me it was time to go to bed. 

Once I had emerged from my twelve-hour headache hibernation, I decided to check out (with a clear mind) how migraines could be made into a sweepstakes. Read more

Calm down, everyone: Facebook will not provide you with a shiny blue smartphone. What it will do is take over the phone you’d planned to buy next month. Today’s Zuckerberg press conference served as the launch of the new “Facebook Home”, a sort of app cluster that will dominate a specially designed HTC Android phone. Facebook doesn’t want to create your mobile phone — it wants to become your mobile phone. Zuck called Home “the best version of Facebook there is”, and the company debuted this promo spot:

Looks…cool. But what does it mean?

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A while ago we posted on how Facebook‘s newfangled “graph search” setup could help PR pros and marketers more effectively push their clients’ content to the general public and conduct market research. But here’s something we never thought about: what if graph search could double as a media contact database?

We recently spoke to Peter Axtman of Sunshine Sachs to learn how he used graph search to score a big PR win for a client with a very specific target audience.

Axtman was working to promote a client called Playground Sessions, an instructional app-maker that is “like Rosetta Stone for piano”. Axtman told us that, though the client had received some “mainstream tech coverage“, he “wanted to talk to niche piano publications” that might appeal more explicitly to the client’s target audience — people interested in learning to play piano or improve their form without in-person training.

So he turned to graph search with surprising (and encouraging) results.

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Today in Classic PR Infighting news: we’ve all heard of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg‘s book Lean In, which is all about how women need to assert themselves more aggressively in the workplace.

Of course Sandberg’s been making the media rounds to promote the book. This week Kate Losse, an early Facebook employee who once wrote speeches for Mark Zuckerberg and published a memoir about her experience there, posted a critical review of the book in Dissent magazine.

Here’s how current Sandberg rep and former Facebook PR chief/Losse coworker Brandee Barker responded:

Wow. twitter.com/fake_train/sta…

— kate losse (@fake_train) March 27, 2013

Alright then!

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Yeah, so yesterday Bud Light made an earnest attempt to ride the “marriage equality viral avatar” train by posting this image for its 5,600,000 Facebook fans:

This infographic proves that yuppies and hipsters like the cheap stuff just as much as stereotypical rednecks (and as real-life rednecks we resent the implication that Bud Light drinkers are anti-gay). So while we have little doubt that this image inspired many Bud lovers to do a double take, we can’t imagine it led too many people to “unlike” the page.

What do we think of it from a brand perspective? Quick, clever stunt or shameless meme-jacking? Is there a difference?

Facebook’s latest plan to convince brands and advertisers that its services have some real-world value involves utilizing the endless data collected via users’ adventures beyond their own accounts.

In other words, Zuck and company’s new aggregation partners will collect info about what users do when they’re not scrolling through their newsfeeds so the ‘book can better tailor ads to relevant audiences and convince more clients to pay for exposure. Yes, the faceless Big Data-bot wants to know which books you bought on Amazon, which shows you watch on Hulu and which restaurants you like on Yelp and Seamless — because it’s all about those cookies. Identifying data will be scrambled, so your names won’t be revealed. But still: New World Order, One World Government, cats marrying dogs, yadda yadda. We’re all doomed.

As All Things D‘s Peter Kafka observed yesterday, this sounds a whole lot like what Google and other companies have been doing for years. So now brands have two options: they can promote themselves the Facebook way by shoving sponsored stories in your face or they can use outside data to reach target audiences like everyone else. They can also do both and compare the data.

More options are a good thing! But will this move make Facebook more valuable for clients and users? We’re pretty tired of seeing sponsored posts that don’t interest us at all, so we’ll say maybe.

If you haven’t seen the photo to the left, it’s a safe bet you haven’t been on Facebook in the past 24 hours.

The Human Rights Campaign’s drive for marriage equality has taken social media by storm as the Supreme Court hears arguments in the Proposition 8 case. The social campaign launched around 1 p.m. EST Monday afternoon, when the organization changed its Facebook profile picture to the logo at left.

So what was this all about? “Red is a symbol for love, and that’s what marriage is all about,” HRC spokesperson Charlie Joughin told MSNBC.com on Tuesday. “We wanted to give people an opportunity to show their support for marriage equality in a public and visible way.”

Even if you failed to log into Facebook, celebrities and politicians alike made sure their Twitter followers knew all about the campaign:

Use this photo for your profile pics this week in support of marriage equality during these very… instagram.com/p/XVCe0XRsXT/

— Lance Bass (@LanceBass) March 26, 2013

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Hey students and recent grads, here’s something that could have an influence on job opportunities: your Facebook profile. More specifically, we’re talking about your close and not-so-close friends–and the way you interact with them. This seems like a no-brainer, but some facts might surprise you.

Yesterday our sister site AllFacebook (like them on Facebook!) reported on a study conducted by the social network and Carnegie Mellon University that looked to answer an intriguing question: how do your Facebook habits affect your likelihood of finding a new job? Its key finding:

Facebook users who talked more with close friends regarding job hunts and job opportunities were much more likely to find employment than those who tended to reach out to acquaintances.

Other findings:

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