The Facebook username landrush has passed, and I had to settle for my firstname.lastname combination after the username I desired was no longer available. Even if I was on my machine during the waning moments of the countdown.

While only a handful of my Facebook friends were in the bandwagon of 200,000 users in the first minute (and was reported that there were 500,000 in the first 15 minutes and 1,000,000 in the first hour) the event was successful.

But there were those who tried to steal everyone's attention. One has to be careful to spell usernames. There is no UNDO function for mistakes made. At the same time one has to be very quick to register his/her username. Popular online personality Michael Arrington at Techcrunch learned it the hard way. (I think he'll get that one sorted out.) Others were simply furious. Still, there are others who just want to make people smile:

Everyone seems to find it exciting to use Twitter, the microblogging tool that allows one to send short messages 140 characters at a time. Because blog is long and boring, Twitter offers an avenue for one to be more straightforward, direct to the point. As Twitter becomes a new tool to broadcast ourselves, let's consider it as another marketing channel where we can draw attention from the crowd. And with digital marketing, visits to our links via Twitter should be tracked. In this manner we will be able to compare how effective Twitter is. We write our rants, we respond to questions, we share links (with the help of URL shortening services). That's the beauty of Twitter. (In case you're starting out with Twitter, you may want to read this user manual. Otherwise, you may want to follow BeansBox if you haven't done so yet.)

Let's say I am blogging about '101 Tips to be Productive with Twitter', track my pages using Google Analytics and I want to promote it through Twitter, Google AdWords and Digg. Each application allows me to customize the blog URL so that I can embed tracking codes. I will use Google Analytics' URL Builder to do so. Using its interface, let's enter the following information:

We are now deeply exposed to the social media phenomenon. This is good because as explained earlier, we are encouraged to use social media and reap the benefits for us or for our businesses. However, sometimes there are a few people in our social network that everyone seems to be silently talking about. They are the ones who:

1. Post comments, drop messages and joining the conversation with the ONLY aim of promoting their products, services or themselves.
2. Post Twitter messages ONLY about themselves or their business.
3. Can't seem to go out of their "comfort zone" and decide not to dwell on discussing topics that have nothing to do with their ulterior motives.
4. Dismiss ideas that might conflict theirs, instead of engaging in a healthy conversation online.
5. Are too conscious about their profile that it is necessary to use popular search engine keywords in hope that they will be (the likes of "Top Social Media Blogger in the Whole Wide World. Period")

I have seen too many of them because in my Facebook account for example, I have close to 500 contacts and have a little over 150 at Twitter. In Facebook particularly, I can easily pinpoint who are those classified under this category. They just don't see the real meaning of healthy balanced conversation and only think of ways how to become the center of attention.

While it is good to see in our web analytics tool that our website attracts a good number of visitors, it is not enough. We may notice a general improvement in the number of people who visit our site using a variety of channels but if it does not bring us to our ultimate goals (convert to a purchase or become sales leads), we are attracting high volume, low quality traffic. Worse, large volume of traffic could cost us more through excessive bandwidth usage and could render our site useless.