Marketers, if you're looking for tips on how to make the most of Twitter's new ad platform, skip this and harass your favorite Twitter guru. Heck, my cohort Cathy Taylor already gave a good taste of what's new about the ad model. There's enough sound advice out there. Instead, here are six simple steps you can take to fail miserably with Promoted Tweets....

Yesterday morning, as the sun rose in the east, Twitter announced that its ad platform would be something called "Promoted Tweets." But for all of its Google-like components, including the fact that, at first, the Promoted Tweets will show up only in search results, the thing that got me most excited were the Promoted Tweets that might go "Poof!" Yes, it's true. If no one cares enough about a paid tweet (which will be measured using what Twitter execs are calling resonance, using things like retweets, bit.ly and so forth), then it simply disappears as though it never existed at …

My poor editors. When writing a column about the iPad while using an iPad, I'm out of my element. Without multitasking, I can't readily fact-check. I'm less prone to make major revisions. And I may miss a few autocorrections that guess the wrong spelling. Then again, do you know how many times I am checking Facebook, Twitter, and Digg while writing this? Zero. Score one for the iPad, at the expense of social media.

Jeez. It sure is hard getting traction for your flailing social network these days, so if you're in that game, better not to even try. I'm reminded of this a lot, but never more so than with the news yesterday that AOL was either going to sell or shutter Bebo -- which it spent $850 million acquiring only two years ago.

Social media is changing the world for the better. I know this because of the conversation I have, over and over again, every time I run a social media workshop for companies. It starts with an honest and understandable question: "What if we get on Twitter and people say horrible things?"

You may have seen the study put out yesterday by allrecipes.com and Psychster that studies the engagement activity around seven different online ad types (via Mashable). The stat that most stood out to me was this: "Corporate Profiles on social networking sites produced greater purchase intent and more recommendations when users could become a fan and add the logo to their own profiles than when they could not."

In honor of the season, where some celebrate the ancient story of slaves' exodus from Egypt, it's time for a new telling of the ten plagues: the Ten Plagues of Social Media.

If you were going to create a new application or tool to take advantage of the current trends in social media, what elements would you include? Add your thoughts in the comments, but I'll share my wish list.

Social media is a land of many holy grails - if it's not completely antithetical to have more than one - but probably none is more prized by marketers than the Influencer, that person who can sway opinion, get people to buy products and otherwise, well, influence the hearts and minds of dozens, hundreds and thousands of other people.

The New York Times has a big story today on online privacy -- or lack thereof. But that's not really the privacy story of the week that interests me. Yesterday, the AP ran a story detailing how the Feds use Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter to nab suspects -- sometimes by breaking the terms of service of these sites by pretending to be someone else. The IRS even uses Google Street View to investigate taxpayers, as it turns out. Better think twice before you claim poverty while actually in the process of putting a huge, new addition on your house.