Yesterday we posted on Bud Light‘s well-timed decision to offer Facebook fans its own variation on the very viral Human Rights Campaign marriage equality avatar. Now we’d like to showcase some other examples of brands that were, if not quite “bold”, at least attuned to news trends — and the interests of their target audiences. Here are some more branded variations on the avatar:

Equal artificial sweetener: We can’t confirm that the brand itself created this one, but if they didn’t then they certainly missed out on a great opportunity.

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The way we see it, the three biggest potential PR fails for a social network are service dropouts, unannounced changes in service conditions or privacy breaches. Flickr, the extremely popular photo sharing service owned by Yahoo that is not in any way threatened by the rise of Instagram, is now dealing with every social company’s PR nightmare: due to a software bug, the company unintentionally celebrated its ninth birthday by making thousands of users’ private photos publicly visible for nearly three weeks (while they didn’t appear in Google searches, they were visible to all other users).

Why is this significant? First 0f all, Flickr’s taglines assure users (some of whom pay for the service) that “your photos are safe with us”. The service’s user base also uploads a significant quantity of porn–as one user put it, her account included “a few naughty photos…for friends only” that may have been seen by any of the site’s thousands of users.

Flickr responded by making any “potentially marked” public photos private–which angered users who weren’t involved in the breach but saw their intentionally public pics disappear from the feed. Yahoo released a statement calling the problem “very small” and asserting that it avoided disclosing the issue to the public to avoid a bigger freakout, choosing instead to contact individual users directly.

Are we reconsidering our Flickr accounts now? Should the company have announced its latest problem sooner?

Yes, we’re still a little overwhelmed by all the Sandy stories, but we’d like to bring you another example of a brand that scored a PR win during the storm. This story is even more relevant because the brand in question, The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), has a generally terrible reputation–the public almost universally sees it and the crucial service it provides as a necessary evil (again, we don’t have any nifty links, so readers outside the NYC area will just have to trust us on this).

And yet, a very interesting Buzzfeed piece reveals the organization’s up-to-the-minute social media documentation of the Sandy crisis and the public’s overwhelmingly positive response.

The MTA’s official Twitter feed, @MTAInsider, quickly provided information on service outages and changes well into the night each day this week, posting helpful resources like a constantly updated subway map. The feed also reported on less popular developments, like the fact that the group’s previously waived fees would go back into effect tonight at midnight. Even more impressive were the feed’s many links to the revealing, horrifying and sometimes beautiful photographs featured on its Flickr stream (with accompanying video clips).

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Traffic on the new social network Google+ is down 3 percent this month, which has some people speculating that it is the beginning of the end.

Others think it’s way too soon to judge because so few people are using it, (10 million compared to Facebook’s latest estimate of 750 million ) and because it is not open to the public yet.

It’s also prompting questions about whether people have room in their lives for another social network.

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