There is always a lot of talk about evaluating performance in Social Media. The first step is to establish baselines.

One of my favorite courses that I teach for Hitachi Data Systems covers a product called Hitachi Tuning Manager. It's a data collection and performance reporting tool. One of the first lab exercises we give students deals with establishing baselines for reporting. You have to know where you're coming from to observe your growth.

Make time today to record the following Twitter metrics:

• Number of followers
• How many lists you are on
• The number of Direct Messages
• How many ReTweets you are generating
• Klout rating

Today will be your baseline. We go forward from here.  You can find the first three numbers on your Twitter home page and the last two you can get from @klout.

guru

This is a guru:

Guru Hargobind ji (1606-1644)

It's a title bestowed on a teacher or leader by others. It's not a title that one assumes on their own. There's another term for self-styled "gurus," and that is "douchebag."

There are some smart people out there doing social media and PR. Look around, ask for recommendations. Don't get pulled in by e-books and webinars and "calls" with people who are all talk.

Bulls

Today is the Running of the Bulls in New Orleans, and @stephanieamayne says it all:

Here's the run from last year:

Summertime in New Orleans!

Mommyblogger

Literally, a mom who blogs. This, of course, is a pretty broad classification, but the term is usually limited to a smaller subset. Mommybloggers are women who blog about being mothers. They talk about their kids, families, and life in general. My favorite mommybloggers are the women of MotherTalkers, a community effort that has its origins in the (politically) left-leaning DailyKos community.

Many mommybloggers are good reads. Others, well, not so much. Cliques, drama, and shameless commercialism have invaded a genre of blogging that used to be consistently enjoyable.

Still, many mommyblogs are a lot of fun. What are your favorites?

Administrivia: We had technical difficulties yesterday, so there was no WOTD for 8-July.

Wanna send a 20-year career to hell in 140 characters? Get on Twitter:

In the latest case of new media (or oversharing) gone wrong, CNN’s Senior Editor of Mideast Affairs Octavia Nasr is leaving the company following the controversy caused by her tweet in praise of Hezbollah leader Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah

Here's the tweet that got Nasr canned:

Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah.. One of Hezbollah's giants I respect a lot. #Lebanon

The CNN blog has her explanation/retraction. It doesn't read at all like a backtrack but truly the 1000-word context to a 140-character statement. 

Nasr was in a position that's obviously a bit more delicate than others.  All too many things that directly touch upon Israel and Palestine can be hazardous to your employment.  The nuance of language is totally lost in 140 characters.

How should have Octavia Nasr handled this?  Tweet a pointer to a blog entry that offered the explanation up front.  Easier said then done, though, when you're thoughts are racing and the smartphone is in your hand.

Moral of the story: THINK BEFORE YOU TWEET!

API

API is geek-speak for "Application Programming Interface." In day-to-day life, APIs are something the average person doesn't stop to ponder, sort of like how you don't really stop to think that your microwave oven has a microprocessor. You just use them. The term API takes on a new significance in the Social Media world, though, because of Twitter.

That's because Twitter offers very poor service to its users and a significant portion of those folks access the world's most popular micro-blogging platform via its API. The Twitter API is the means by which anyone using "client" software such as Seesmic Desktop, Tweetdeck, or HootSuite sends and receives tweets. Twitter limits the number of times their users can access the API in an hour, and these limitations have been the source of much frustration and speculation. High-volume Twitter users found the services low API limits to be a serious constraint. The service finally increased the hourly limit to 350, and that seemed to calm folks down a bit. Last month, however, Twitter chose to do work on the computer server infrastructure that implements the API. They cut the number of accesses from 350/hour to 175/hour, further tarnishing their reputation for poor performance and service.

Why Twitter decided to do major maintenance to their API infrastructure in the middle of the FIFA World Cup, the most popular sporting event in the world, is beyond me. Combine that with the on-going tragedy that is the BP oilspill in the Gulf of Mexico and the oh-so-critical "LeBron watch," and the lower limit was a recipe for disaster.

As of this morning, however, the API limit appears to be back at 350.

But don't worry, no doubt this afternoon's Germany-Spain match in the La Copa Mundial semi-finals will break it.

Coffee

Ah, coffee. The Internet does not run on Google. It's not powered by Linux.

It's fueled by coffee.

Here in New Orleans, that means a cafe au lait with chicory coffee.

The beignets are also awesome.

Enjoy!

SEO is short for "Search Engine Optimization." The idea behind SEO is to build a website in such a way that it ranks as high as possible on popular search engines such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo.

While it's possible to "purchase keywords" on search engines, most on-line retailers and content providers prefer to be as high as they can be in "organic" search rankings, meaning the top of the un-paid results.

SEO is arguably both an art and a science. The various search engines use algorithms to rank pages by keyword, so one would think it should be simple to reverse-engineer what how the algorithm searches and build web pages that score highest within those algorithms. The artistic aspect of this process is to design web style sheets and write content that doesn't look like it's been created by and for robots.

How important is Search Engine Optimization? If your business relies heavily on Internet sales, very. The biggest problem for the business owner is finding a "SEO consultant" who actually knows what they're doing. There are a lot of people on Facebook and Da Twittah who claim to know the ins and outs of SEO, but few know much more than you could learn yourself in a couple of hours of on-line reading.

At Yatmedia, we don't claim to be experts in the esoterica of SEO. We know a few, though, and when solid SEO is important to our clients, we bring them in on the job. The rest of the time, we ply them with coffee, food, and booze to give us insight into what's going on in their world.

Freedom is a word you hear a lot in the Fourth of July in the US of A.  Our Declaration of Independence explained in painstaking detail to King George III of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland the freedoms Americans wanted and needed.

Social media users have a lot of freedoms:

Freedom to un-follow people in twitter
Freedom to "hide" people on Facebook, often avoiding the drama of "unfriending"
Freedom to create an e-mail account on Hotmail, Yahoo!, or Google to disguise your identity

And you've always got the freedom to go back and use MySpace.  Whenever you want.  Even if nobody else you know does.

Happy Fourth of July!

The term douchebag has a number of derogatory meanings.  Primarily used as a female-specific equivalent to scumbag, douchebag tries to be gross and insulting at the same time, and usually succeeds.

In the political world, douchebag is used often, hurled back and forth among bloggers on the right and left.  The funniest use of the term in this context is probably Jon Stewart's referring to the late Robert Novak as the "douchebag of liberty" on The Daily Show.

In the advertising world, a good example of a douchebag would be the guys who created this "Here We Go" commercial for Bud Light:

In Budweiser's defense, their ad people aren't always douchebags by contrast, here's the Mexican version of "here we go," done to promote the beer and the Mexican national side in the World Cup:

it's not fair!  The Mexicans get a cool commercial celebrating their national sport and we get one mocking our national heritage.  Here we go, indeed.

But of course, in our world of Social Media, we have the New Media Douchebag:

Whatever you do for a living, try not to be a douchebag. The rest of us will love you for it!