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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I recorded a video back in Novem­ber 2006 titled WordPress.com — Step-by-Step Tuto­r­ial on How to Blog that has gar­nered 145,036 views. How­ever, WordPress.com has gone through a num­ber of look-and-feel updates in the last three years, so I thought I would update the video.

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