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:

I've been using Remember the Milk (RTM) for a couple years to manage all sorts of work and personal tasks with varying degrees of success. And lately, I've also been digging a bit more deeply into the Getting Things Done (GTD) "action management" methodology/philosophy, working on applying its principles to gain control over the myriad tasks that swirl around at work and at home each day.

Those spammy chain emails from ten years ago have come true!

Simple: just don't write anything for two weeks!

It's not like I have a lack of material. I have an "Ideas" tab in my Remember The Milk task list, and in there are several items tagged "blog". There are 31 pages saved in my "Read It Later" list and even more "starred" articles in Google Reader.

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.

America's Finest News Source sums up the essence of social media: Local Idiot To Post Comment On Internet.

We've all heard the cliche "if you fail to plan, you might as well plan to fail." Now comes this sobering piece from Overcoming Bias, by way of 43 Folders on The Planning Fallacy, "a common cognitive bias... which is a repeatable, documented error in thinking that apparently explains why we all tend to underestimate task-completion times."