Is it just me? Or is this coming Black Friday just the beginning of a bunch of increasingly darker ones for media companies? "S@les are virtual, LOL for Black Friday retailers" says the headline of a New York Post story which makes it known that the Twitter feed Cheaptweet -- one among many aggregating holiday deals -- is spitting out 800 deals per hour. And then there are all the individual retailers using the social Web to get the word out about their holiday promos: Toys 'R' Us, Target, Amazon -- they're all there, tweeting and Facebook-ing their way to …

What can the scores of social media metrics available really tell you about the success of your marketing programs? It's fitting to start the exploration with a question, since we'll focus on six of them now: Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How.

Sorry to break it to you, Fortune 100, but when it comes to Twitter, most of you really, really suck. That's the primary takeaway from a study just released by Weber Shandwick showing that while many of you may tweet a good game, the vast majority of you may think you do, but you don't.

At most of the events I've been to lately, measurement continues to be a hot topic. The first question that comes up is, "What can I measure?" That's where this cheat sheet can come in handy: a list of 100 thought-starters.

It's tempting to say the best thing about the wine-tasting event Spit & Twit was the name, and maybe it was, but what made an even bigger impression was how social media is changing the nature of real-world events. It also showed the limitations of being digitally and physically social at once.

You may remember that a few weeks back, the Social Media Insider was a victim of paralyzing brain fog, on deadline, when she couldn't make any sense of all the social media information being thrown her way. While you're free to theorize that it was really writer's block, the experience led me to wonder, more than ever, what ways people are finding to filter social media streams well enough to derive quality from all of the often mind-numbing quantity.

The ways to access social content just increased by a factor of one -- a big one, with Microsoft's MSN.com announcing that it, too, will allow users to access their social nets from the MSN home page. While the news has certainly gotten the headlines that a portal with monthly traffic of 100 million warrants, in fact, MSN is the last of what used to be the portal world's Big Three to do so. In case you haven't noticed (ha! as if that were possible), Yahoo has transformed its home page into being all about Y!ou! AOL, meanwhile, has offered …

Twitter just introduced Twitter Lists, the biggest change to its service that ever came from the top down, rather than from users or third parties. The best way to understand the feature is to try it out yourself, as it's rapidly rolling out if you check twitter.com. But I'll give you a taste of what it means for your day job, as well as your day-to-day Twitter usage.