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 and 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 these features for a while.

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.

I'm sitting at the 140 Conference in L.A. and have just finished listening to the CMO of Kodak and the VP of marketing for Virgin America talk about the value of their Twitter and social media usage. Kodak's Jeffrey Hayzlett explained how Kodak was able to name its new product based on suggestions from Twitter. Virgin America's Porter Gale shared several stories of how her company's social media usage helped retain existing customers. There's something missing, though: ROI.

Here's something you don't see very often: the Social Media Insider staring at a blinking cursor, with no freakin' clue as to what the column should be about, five hours into the work day. I've trolled all of the usual sources looking for something to write about. But you know and I know that my lack of a topic was generated by something else: the information overload engine.

Microsoft is expected to announce that tweets and Facebook status updates will be searchable via Bing, expanding what we all perceived to be the potential audience for the inania that makes up our daily lives. Better yet, the deal is nonexclusive, which means, at any second, Google will be sifting through your boring life, too!.

Bacardi recently launched its latest campaign, called "Islands," which is poised to make a splash (pun intended) in the world of social media -- but in the end, what is the company trying to accomplish? Like any successful marketing campaign, a social media push should do two things: build the brand and sell more rum. The real question social marketers want to know is, how does Bacardi go about dropping a good amount of marketing money in social media and drive sales?

And, do big, consumer-facing businesses have even the slightest idea of how to synthesize the "information" provided to them by all of these newly empowered whiners? The answer to the first question is "yes." And to the second? No.

If self-regulating were entirely up to advertisers, that would be one thing - I'm normally a supporter of self-regulation. But in social media, as we've learned time and time again, the message is essentially out of advertisers' control.

Have you heard the one about the hare and the owl, or the watering hole, or the Hall of Wonders? These are no ordinary tales. In fact, they're of an entirely new genre: folktales for social media marketers.

Per usual, I wasn't invited. In this case, I wasn't invited to test out Google Wave, the new communication and collaboration tool (with the badly timed name) that Google dispersed to 100,000 developers and invitees yesterday. I did, however, look at the video of most of the one-hour-and-20-minute presentation Google gave to developers back in May It got me thinking about how Google Wave further flattens the distinctions between email and IMing, blogging and collaborating, while also expanding the definition of social media, and media itself. Whether this particular platform catches on isn't exactly the point. It's a significant step down a path that is becoming more heavily traveled every day.

It's time to atone. Some may appreciate the timing, as it coincides with yesterday's observance of Yom Kippur, Judaism's Day of Atonement, the climax of a period of repentance. Everyone has some sins to atone for, including marketers and agencies trying to engage consumers through social media. Today, we'll confess.

Being out at Advertising Week events this week proved to me that I'm not the only one obsessed with the fact that a business model needs to be developed for media companies and advertisers to make real, bottom line-lifting hay out of random, lightning-in-a-bottle media phenomenon. Things like Susan Boyle, Kanye West's MTV diss and other events that are increasingly huge reach vehicles, but exponentially less predictable than big, annual media events like the Super Bowl. In fact, their power and their problem is that they aren't predictable at all.

Not all mobile applications are social, but those with social elements will keep pushing social media's boundaries forward.

Maybe I suffer from too much skepticism, but this social media headline from Ad Age certainly grabbed my attention: "Facebook Finds Profitability Despite Nascent Advertising Model." Drilling a little deeper this morning, I discovered that this information came straight from Mark Zuckerberg at the Facebook blog, who, in the second-to-last paragraph of a post yesterday, said, in a "BTW" kinda fashion: "Earlier this year, we said we expected to be cash flow positive sometime in 2010, and I'm pleased to share that we achieved this milestone last quarter."

Given how obsessed people are with social networks, especially younger consumers who use it to religiously keep in touch with their friends, it's hardly surprising that mobile social network usage is skyrocketing. So which networks are benefiting the most from the trend?

Given the heavy topics I've dealt with lately in this column, writing about VitaminWater's crowdsourcing of its next flavor on Facebook seems pretty prosaic. And yet, as one of my favorite topics -- and yours -- is the role of focus groups in a world where there is much richer data about consumers than ever before, it's worth pondering how successful crowdsourced products will be -- and what the role of crowdsourcing will be in marketing going forward.