The nature of really breaking out of the startup pack these days is becoming a viral or word of mouth (WOM) overnight success. Outside of Facebook’s social graph anaconda, Twitter has been parlayed forward by Ashton, Oprah, Britney and many of the other known-by-one-name celebs into the next Digg/Facebook/etc.

If American Idol is a barometer of talent - or Susan Boyle, an example of instant stardom (even if it took xx years to get there); then Twitter and now FourSquare are showcases of how to enter the media fray successfully.  

Yuri Milner, Digital Sky Technologies’ CEO, continues to raise successive funds around digital investments, following money into Facebook, Groupon, Zygna and the recent April acquisition of AOL’s ICQ. With a new $1B war chest - or warhead - as its next stage of funding, DST will likely be adding $10-$100M+ to digital companies that do not have the same media cache as digital brands in the States.

Strong in the social space already, expect DST to pursue digital companies who are already profitable, partner well with the Facebook mothership, and scale very well.  

Netflix became more transparent recently, by posting its internal company culture preso, i.e., how it inspires great hires, values context not control, and rewards adequate performance with severance. Given that Twitter had its internal documents hacked and sent to many blogs, it’s a welcome blast of fresh air when a next-gen, New Medici-like company like Netflix shares its values.

Reflecting on how mobile media has come to encompass “social media” - especially with Twitter leading the charge - below, please find a few helpful tools and tricks to support your Twitter addiction:

Twitter Tools:

• Seesmic Desktop (Adobe Air client for fast multi-account tweet management and search)
• TweetDeck (alternative to the above)
• Tweetie (the best iPhone client)
• MrTweet (search submission tool to help get followers)
• @geofollow (keyword submission tool)
• Twitpic (for better photo tweeting)
• Twitterholic (follower rankings and stats)
• Last, click here for an exhaustive list of 3rd party twitter apps…  
  

The business of Gold Farming - where paid gamers amass gold to sell to less-experienced users to game the MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games like WOW (”World of Warcraft”) is a well known practice. In a parallel world of connections, perhaps equivalent to “gold” in terms of business leads or viral marketing armies to launch brands, one could imagine a new kind of innovative farming for profit around social media relationships. Think “Twitter sweatshops,” “Facebook factories,” “Diggsourcing” and “LinkedIn (Assembly) Lines.” After the jump, a metaphorical goldmine…

Call it “Micro Diaries of a Mad Twitterer,” but early 30s Gary Vaynerchuk has amassed a meta-canon of video blogs (aka vlogs) and Twitter-Facebook updates. Specifically, these are not normal ‘human’ numbers of vlogs or Twitter updates - GaryVee (GV), as he goes by, has 208,000+ Twitter followers and upwards of 20,000 once-counted Facebook fans. He’s creating a legacy of video bloggers - Samantha Ettus at Obsessedtv.com - to build on his “personal branding” meets “social business” platform. And the recent non-digital coup: a book deal with HarperStudio - 10 social branding books for a 7-figure deal. A breakdown of the deal, the frequency dilemma for GV, and his growing personal brand network - after the jump…  

Much of the social media news in the past couple of weeks has focused on Facebook’s release of a number of new features. Some of the features have been welcomed, while one in particular has garnered most of the attention and criticism.

How much is your Twitter account name worth (not your Twitter following or value of Twits) to you? As an individual, a personality/ celeb or a real brand? I recently took a drive through the oh-so-simple registration, and there’s still a lot of top level twits (TLTs?) available. Remember all of those domain names you couldn’t buy because domain squatters were holding them ransom? Well, my prediction is that the great land grab - this time around a kind of Twitfest Destiny - is back. The year of the Twitter squatters (”Twatters”) is upon us.  

I had coffee with a longtime investor colleague who threw a nice metaphor in my direction: “thread count” as it related to the depth of your friendships. As we all initiate, accept or add new digital relationships into our lives (yes, I did get ’social’ with LinkedIn back in its early years with 1,500 linkedins; more recently with ~650 Facebook friends), how do we measure the relative quality of the quantity of friends we connect to? Do we connect to add relative quality value to our own persona, or is it done merely to create a personal, i.e., quantitative, fan club of sorts?  

I’ll admit it. I’m a social media junkie. And it’s not difficult to satisfy my addiction, considering the large number of social media sites that are quickly popping up as of late. But it has also got me thinking – considering the popularity of social media sites these days, should we be more concerned about our privacy? 5 years ago, it was only the early adopters who were on sites like MySpace and Friendster and most people were weary of sharing too much on the internet. These days Facebook has well over 100 million registered users, and over 222 million visitors per month. After the jump, a list of some of latest and greatest social media sites, along with ways you can ensure that the whole world knows everything about you…  

On reading Techcrunch’s advance review of a WSJ reporter’s new tell-all book on MySpace, I updated my Facebook status with bewilderment that MySpace passed on buying Facebook for $75M in 2004. And I made a Freudian typo…  

CES 2009 Panel: Social Networks & User Generated Media as a Technology Challenge: The Platform, the Content & the Network. Amid 150″ HD television announcements, this past Saturday I paneled a CES/Digital Hollywood discussion on the start-up requirements of social networks - what the technology challenges were, new ways to acquire users and monetize during recession.