THE SOCIAL TIMES — Pay particular attention to this post if you’re a small business owner and want to use Twitter to make more money. Dell has been claiming that they made over $6 million using Twitter, but does that statistic validate Twitter’s marketing power to the world outside of billion dollar corporations? I contest that it isn’t the case by looking at the numbers below...

MASHABLE — Creating and maintaining a corporate blog, or a blog of any sort for that matter, isn’t always the easiest of tasks and doesn’t come naturally to most people. There are a lot of considerations to take into account -- theme, topics, audience, content, design, writers, multimedia, promotion, writing style, comment policies, and so on. Above and beyond all of that, you also need to consider the blog’s name and URL. Although the act of creating blog posts can be quite simple, forethought and planning must first go into the creation of a corporate blog in order to keep the processes running smoothly, especially if multiple bloggers are involved...

VENTUREBEAT — Dell is announcing a deal with Threadless today where it will use designs from the T-shirt company’s crowdsourced shirts as cover art for its laptops. Threadless is a decade-old online design community where artists can submit T-shirt designs. The community then votes on the best designs and Threadless makes T-shirts out of the top six designs. The artists are paid a flat reward of $2,000 and retain non-fashion rights to the designs. They also get a $500 gift certificate for the Threadless web site, and Threadless will pay the selected artists flat licensing fees for the Dell deals...

CLICKZ — Dell has put digital at the heart of a rebranding campaign that will combine its enterprise IT offerings with those of Perot Systems, which it acquired last year. The merged unit now operates under the name Dell Services. Over half the marketing spend for Dell's new "Wide Open" initiative will go to interactive channels - mainly search, social/community, and B2B display media - in a bid to drive awareness of the new identity...

E-CONSULTANCY.COM — Dell is one of those companies that has gotten a lot of attention as an early adopter on Twitter. But getting into a new medium early isn't the same as getting the most out of it. Sometime last year, the company realized it had over 20 Twitter accounts. Not all of them were effective. Speaking at TWTRCON in New York this week, Dell's Stefanie Nelson explained how the company assessesed the ROI of its social media efforts and streamlined its productivity in the space. Dell initially got on Twitter in 2007. Its efforts in the space have been well documented. Dell notably made millions in sales attributed to Twitter last year. But that doesn't mean the company's social strategy isn't a work in progress...