NASA learned some lessons in the very early days of Twitter with tweets about the Mars Rover. At the time, it was the third most followed Twitter account, with about 75,000 followers. That’s different than today, where NASA astronaut Mike Massimino has about 1.3 million followers on Twitter.

Tthe @NASA account is the primary NASA Twitter account and it is operated out of the office of communications at headquarters. NASA centers operate their own Twitter feeds, usually out of the office of communications. At the project and program level then it’s usually somebody on there who is running the Twitter feed because they are most connected to the information and what’s actually happening.

It recently introduced buzzroom.NASA.gov, which is tracks tweets, pictures and videos that employ the NASA hash tag. That way people without a Twitter account can contribute to the conversation through that page.

At TWTRCON NY last month, PETA launched a cyber attack on Twitter complaining about NASA’s treatment of monkeys. Schierholz says that while NASA works to correct any factual errors, it’s just not worth engaging with somebody who’s just out to be negative so it won’t respond.

Offline, NASA has been hosting NASA Tweetups. It gives people who follow NASA on Twitter the opportunity to come to an agency center and interact with agency personnel and get a behind the scenes view of what the agency’s doing. For the last launch Tweetup NASA had more than 1,000 people register online for 150 spots.

For example, about two years ago, Webster’s team was asked to develop a cult following for Cisco products, which is difficult, because most people don’t even see the products that are in the background or the infrastructure. So, for the launch of a router called ASR 1000, it enlisted fairytale characters from Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny talking about how dependent they are on the network and what would happen if they have reliability issues on Christmas Eve.

The microsite, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook campaign allowed people to send this to friends, and along the way, it encouraged them to register for a virtual event that was on this particular day to find out what it is that’s going to save Christmas, Cisco had 8,000 different members of the service provider community online at the same time for this reveal, and the overall results were about six times more than a launch it did in the traditional way in 2004 for about 1/8 the cost. It also ran a tournament that had over 50,000 participants around the world.

Webster says social media and social networking definitely are much more cost effective than other programs, although Cisco is not abandoning older ways of doing business. It’s just shifting the weight. When Cisco has major launches a couple of times per year, about 25 percent of the budget is dedicated to more traditional things like paid placement, and about 75% is for more Web 2.0 social networking, social media outreach, content production, virtual, online events.

Then, starting this week, Old Spice Guy started producing personalized videos in real time to folks who had commented upon him online. He sent these out via Twitter and has created a sensation. The 87 short comedic YouTube videos made Tuesday plus the 74 or so made Wednesday have now been viewed more than 4 million times and counting, according to Read Write Web.

He’s working incredibly fast, about 11 hours a day while standing topless in a shower setting. The campaign is being led by a team of creative types, tech geeks, marketers and writers gathered in Portland, Oregon by marketing agency Wieden + Kennedy.

The group seeded various social networks with an invitation to ask questions of Mustafa’s character. The responses were tracked and users who contributed interesting questions and/or were high-profile people on social networks are being responded to directly and by name in short, funny YouTube videos. The group has made videos in response to Digg founder Kevin Rose, former TV star Alyssa Milano, Perez Hilton and many more people, famous and not.

Whether the videos will lead to more Old Spice products sold is unknown, but as Mashable says, “it definitely creates a brand identity that people will be interested and excited to engage with.”

More than 10 airlines in North America, including American, Delta and Southwest, are wiring their planes for Internet access, and major foreign airlines like Lufthansa are introducing new technology that will let customers connect on transoceanic flights, according to a recent article in The New York Times.

About 17 to 20 percent of passengers on Virgin America, which has wired its entire 28-plane fleet for the Internet, are online at any given time, according to the airline. On longer flights, about a third of passengers go online.

The benefits of staying connected became clear several months ago during the eruption of the Icelandic volcano that grounded thousands of European flights. Facebook and Twitter set up sites for stranded travelers, who swapped ideas and offered rides to ferry terminals, and Twitter had its own thread. Based on anecdotal reports, the sites helped in getting information out quickly.

Airlines are using Twitter to resolve problems while still in flight. For example, a passenger on a Virgin America flight once sent an e-mail message to the airline from his seat, saying that he was not pleased with the sandwich he had just eaten. A customer service representative on the ground sent a message back to the plane, and shortly thereafter the passenger was served an acceptable substitute.

Domino’s said sales in its  e-commerce unit had grown by 61.4% in the period and that online sales now accounted for 32.7% of overall UK delivered sales.

In May this year, Domino’s launched a nationwide promotion on Foursquare that it said was key to its success along with other social media initiatives such as affiliate marketing and its superfans programmes. The chain said that its web-based activity had afforded it the dual benefit of “driving pizza sales” and “building customer loyalty”.

The report comes from Marketing Magazine.

Twitter introduced its advertising system in April, first allowing companies (including Starbucks and Sony Pictures) to pay to display their postings on pages of search results for popular topics.  Unlike search results, a trending topic appears on the main page Twitter users see when they are logged into the service, at the bottom of the user-generated list of the 10 most popular talking points on the site.

Coke chose to become the second company to sponsor a trending topic during Wednesday’s final qualifying matches, when teams from the US and England – two of the biggest nations on Twitter – go through to the next stage of the tournament.

“We have formed fabulous relationships with Facebook, YouTube and Twitter,” said Carol Kruse, vice-president for global interactive marketing at CocaCola. “We get a lot of first looks and we jumped on that one [promoted tweets] immediately.”  Such enthusiasm from a large advertiser will come as a boost to Twitter’s efforts to generate revenues from its 190m monthly visitors.

Although Ms Kruse did not reveal how much Coke spent on the campaign, she indicated the test was not expensive compared to other forms of online advertising.

But a few months ago, WWE noticed that its fans were all over Facebook and Twitter talking about its stars. Plus, there was a problem with people impersonating those superstars on Twitter. So, deciding that if you can’t beat ‘em, you ought to join ‘em, the company jumped in to social media, quietly at first.

Within two months, 500,000 Facebook users had hit the “Like” button to become fans on WWE’s Facebook page and more than 93,000 were following the brand on Twitter.

WWE also set up Twitter accounts for many of its top performers. For example, notes Casey Hibbard in an article on SocialMedia Examiner within two hours of his first tweet, WWE superstar John Cena had amassed 5,000 Twitter followers, with the number growing to 30,000 in his first week.

Now, WWE has more than 50 official and performer accounts and 90 official and star pages on Facebook.

To maintain brand consistency across social networks, WWE created a “W” logo to distinguish Twitter and Facebook from imposters. Though initially under the marketing team at WWE, the digital content division now manages social networks, realizing that it’s largely about online content. The team tweets about 10 to 15 times every day, posting news and links back to videos, photos and other content to encourage fans to come back to the WWE website.

Besides improving customer relations, it also helps retain customers, according to Chelsea Marti (@TTaxChels on Twitter), TurboTax’ Social Media Manager, who explained the company’s approach at the TWTRCON NY conference.

TurboTax now has more than 20 million customers, but until this year, TurboTax wasn’t able to provide enough resources on Twitter to handle their queries. That changed in February, however, as it increased the number of employees staffing its Twitter feed to 40 from just two last year.  Had the feed been staffed only by communications and PR folks, it wouldn’t have succeeded given the complex queries it received. So the company employed tax experts to handle questions and the corporate communications team became the hub that farmed out questions to the appropriate folks to answer customers’ tax questions.

Marti said that at least half of the people who came to the feed were about to finish a return.  You can see the entire case study on Econsulstancy’s website.

While Dell still operates a social media department, it now uses social media across all its divisions to connect with customers through online channels such as Facebook and Twitter. Last year, about 100 employees sent tweets through 35 channels, reaching customers in more than 12 countries. And it benefited the bottom line, generating more than $6.5 million in business through Twitter deals during 2009.

About 1.5 million customers follow the company on Twitter, while altogether more than 3.5 million people communicate with Dell via all social media (Twitter, Facebook, Direct2Dell and IdeaStorm). As the company says, it wants to be wherever its customers are.

Although Gomez was, at 17, already a TV star from her days on Barney and Friends and Disney’s Wizards of Waverly Place, she was not know for her singing. So she needed a strategy when she and her band,The Scene, launched their first album. They turned to a cost-effective campaign relying on social media to drum up interest and spread the word.

Fortunately, given her previous media exposure, her Facebook page had more than 3 million fans and she had 1 million followers on Twitter. Gomez and the band launched two major initiatives to get people buzzing about the album online. First, they held a contest through her Facebook page, urging users to upload photos or video of how they were helping to promote the album, handpicked 10 finalists and let the fans vote on the winners.

The second initiative was to offer a limited online preview of the album to fans who attended a listening party. Fans could listen to the full album on  a website, but they had to gain admission first by posting a message to Facebook or Twitter encouraging their friends to listen also.

The result?  In the first week, the album sold over 66,000 copies and went Gold in March 2010.

Check out the other lessons from this case study.