Yesterday was my first WordCamp, held all day at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. I've been caught up by WordPress fever since early this year when I switched from TypePad.

Some 730 people turned out at WordCamp, about double last year's number. Here's a Flickr set of WordCamp photos I took.

The biggest learnings came right at the outset, when Tim Ferriss (pictured above), author of The Four-Hour Workweek, gave a deep dive into what has worked and not worked on his well-trafficked blog. (I finally got to meet Tim and invited him to attend a future Traveling Geeks trip abroad.)

Learnings: What works in a blog post

Ferriss's suggestions were useful not just for beginning bloggers but also for veterans who like to pick up a trick or two.

• He uses CrazyEgg (which has plans at $9, $19, $49 and $99 per month) and Google Analytics for all his blog metrics and checks them religiously.

• For archived blog posts, just a simple change in the title wording from the default "Categories" to "Topics" increased click-throughs significantly. (I did this on my blog years ago.)

• Tim uses Slinkset as a polling mechanism to ask his readers questions, and they in turn vote options up or down. He calls it "a personal Digg."

• He finds RSS "less and less valuable" because it reduces traffic (and thus, presumably, the potential for advertising income) and gives uers an easy excuse for staying away from his site.

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Hello, Socialmedia.biz readers! I apologize for my silence, but I have been finalizing my book on social media and Web 2.0 optimization, which is now in print. I am excited to have it complete so I can actually engage in social media again!

Over the next few months, I will post excerpts from the book, A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization, that I hope you or your clients will find useful.

You can download a special teaser version of the social media book that includes the full table of contents, one complete chapter, and the sample chapter's respective section on the resource CD, including fillable forms.

If you'd like to order it, Socialmedia.biz readers get a special discount: Get the book for $16, including shipping:

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Social media conferences seem to be sprouting up everywhere these days, but one conference consistently does an oustanding job of bringing in high-level people to explain how "big brands" — large corporations — are using social media in the enterprise: BlogWell.

I attended the inaugural BlogWell, a joint venture of GasPedal and the Blog Council, in San Jose last fall and wrote about it here. What I like is that these executives offer frank inside-the-firewall accounts of what's working and not working with social media in their companies, with a focus on corporate blogging success stories.

So I was happy to see a third fourth BlogWell (after Chicago and New York) will be coming to San Francisco on June 23. Details:

Event: BlogWell San Francisco: How big brands use social media

Presentations: Case studies from Dell, Cisco, Wells Fargo, Intuit, SAP, General Mills, Kaiser Permanente and Pepsico.

When: Tuesday, June 23, 2009, 1-5 PM

Where: Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF, 1675 Owens St., San Francisco

Cost: $250. Socialmedia.biz readers receive a 15% discount by using the coupon code THANKSSMBIZ

Register: at http://gaspedal.com/blogwell

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The advertising and public relations industries have to prove their worth. They have to show that what you bought delivered a return on investment (ROI). And the demand to create more accountability for social media increases every single day. Just last month, accountability was the basis for most of the discussion at ad:tech in San Francisco (watch my interview with Scott Milener, CEO of AdRocket, in which he talks about advertisers increasing demand for performance-based advertising).

Five years ago I remember making presentations to blue chip companies about a whole host of different social media projects such as a corporate social network for customers, a video demo site, a corporate blog, and a corporate podcast. While all the presentations went very well, and my audiences were always engaged, the last question always asked was, "How much is it going to cost, and how many people are we going to reach?" While I could offer different cost options, I couldn't guarantee an audience. And it was at that point the pitch was often sunk.

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Here are 16 photos on Flickr I took at the NetSquared Global Conference held Tuesday and Wednesday at Cisco headquarters in San Jose.

Pictured above is Chris Messina of OpenID, Citizen Agency and Flock fame; he gave a stirring presentation about the open social Web.

Recently the TV critic of the St. Petersburg Times asked for my thoughts about the migration of celebrities to Twitter over the past few months. Will it inevitably dumb down the service? Bring it into the mainstream? Make us want to move on to the Next Big Thing?

Ashton Kutcher is closing in on 2 million followers, Britney Spears is at 1.6 million, Oprah at 1.2 million, Shaq and Demi Moore at 1 million and Perez Hilton at 860 followers for some reason.

The columnist, Eric Deggans, did a solid writeup (I'm quoted): Celebrities who Tweet: Tips to keep them from ruining Twitter for us all.

Here's the friendly advice I'm offering to celebrities joining the Twitterverse:

First, understand that you're not leading this parade. But we're happy to have you in it. You have the advantage of having tens or hundreds of thousands of fans follow you on Twitter, even if you don't know the difference between a tweet and a twit. But listen, observe, follow back, participate. It's the golden rule of social media.

Second, how should you use your special powers? To do good.

Ignore the newbie approach of chronicling the mundane aspects of your daily life. The Twitter question isn't really: What are you doing right now? It's: What are you doing that's interesting? Or: what's cool that you've happened across?

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Found out there is a Mac version of Tweetie, so I decided to take a look to see what the buzz is about.

Although I have become accustomed (addicted?) to the Tweetdeck model of multiple panels for various sorts of streams, I really like the way that Tweetie handles DMs. First, there is something that looks like a buddy list, showing friends that have been DMing you, or vice versa, recently. After you click on one of those contacts, you see something like this:

Tweetie DM Chat display, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

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I have been thinking a lot about the social media metrics post I wrote back on May 3rd, Real social media metrics from SM2, and I don't think it did a good enough job at exploring some of the ways I use SM2 by Techrigy so I thought I might put it all together as a step-by-step, unscripted (obviously) process screencast for you to check out.

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Once upon a Myspace time, I tried searching for a few band profiles inside the Myspace network. I didn’t get the exact spelling and spacing right, and ended up on a total search maze. What a disaster! From there on out, I would actually leave Myspace, go back to Google and search there for a Myspace profile. Strange and sad thing is, Myspace search is actually “powered by Google.” Perhaps Myspace has made improvements in this area by now, but I wouldn’t know because I will probably never try again. A year or so later when Facebook features started trumping Myspace, so did its profile search. Facebook currently maintains a dominant position when it comes to people search. However, when the search involves anything outside of people, Facebook search is known to be one of the most frustrating experiences ever. Now after the fairly recent arrival of Google profiles, the fight for the most effective profile aggregator begins.

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