Sean McDonald from the Communities and Conversations team at Dell, a/k/a @smcdonaldatdell, asked about choosing Twitter followers today: How do you decide who to follow? Do you follow everyone that follows you? What are your criteria?

Finding myself unable to sufficiently answer this in 140 characters or less, I figured I'd just post my reply here:

Bob Pearson, VP of Communities and Conversations, recently talked with Forrester's Jeremiah Owyang on social media at Dell:

While it doesn't rival the buzz around Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's introduction as John McCain's running mate, KickApps is getting some action in the blogosphere after the re-launch of McCainSpace.com.

"What you can find out now on the Internet - it's remarkable."

John McCain might be on to something. With the launch of Google Insights for Search on August 6, you can not not only find a running mate, you can see where he or she is a hot search term.

Despite some valid concerns with the data in the early going - some tests conducted on different days with the same criteria returned markedly different results - the potential for Insights to become a game-changing tool for for SEM/SEO strategists is clear.

But wait! There's more!

Social Media is Core to Dell's Marketing Strategy

The video is from an Uberpulse interview conducted at a Dell event in San Francisco. Another blog called Open (minds, finds, conversations) highlighted a quote from Andy underscoring the enormous opportunity social media represents for marketers:

The social media stuff is probably the most important thing we do today, from a marketing standpoint. A lot of the other elements of our marketing mix has sort of become more and more transactional and more and more tactical in nature. The social media stuff is much more strategic... It's about how to use social media to power the fundamentals of the business. That’s what we’re focused on.

Interesting piece on the "rapidly evolving landscape for social tools, services, and networks" and a "graphic that helps chart online conversations between the people that populate communities as well as the networks that connect the Social Web" made freely available by Brian Solis on his PR 2.0 blog.

Mashable today profiled the launch of Userplane Boards, "an innovative new message board product (that) combines aspects of Userplane’s other services like chat and IM with threaded message board discussion, creating a real-time environment that makes following conversations much easier."