In fact, just last week Twitter announced it’s own monetizing strategy, which includes paid tweets from major companies.  Facebook has been doing this for years already, and the same with MySpace, but it’s the first for Twitter and assuming it’s successful, more will follow.

Knowing that there is so much effort and dollars going into social strategies, I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on some tips that can make management these social network profiles much easier.

To begin with, there are tools to help do social marketing. Some are free, some cost money, and typically the free versions give limited tools while providing upgrades to more lucrative tools that would be helpful.  The key is to find what works for you and stick with it. If you can get all you need from a free service like TweetBeep, than you are good to go. However, for those that want more or need to get more of the data, the pro versions and paid tools come in very handy.

Social Monitoring and Social Marketing Tools:

• Ping.fm – This is a great tool and allows a person to create one account, and socialize to all the top social networks with just one click. This is a must have for anyone that has more than one social network.  Did I mention that this is FREE.
• SocialOomph – This is a must have tool for people using Twitter.  This tool helps to schedule tweets, set up recurring tweets, monitor @ replies, and a ton of other things right from one control panel. They have a free version which gives limited tools and the pro version that provides everything under the sun.
• FriendFeed – This is a free services that allows a person to aggregate all of their social feeds into one account and makes it public for others to join and see. This is a good tool to have and allows for people to find your social links and networking much easier.
• TweetBeep – This is a free service that allows people to track certain keywords on Twitter and sends them an email when it is used. Good for brand terms or following a certain trend.
• FlowTown – This is not a free service, but one that has a lot of value. You can give this service a list of emails and it will build a social graph from it showing which social sites those emails appear on. This is great in figuring out where to spend more time to generate customers.

Although these are just a few tools, there are many more and I’d like to see what others are using as well. Please feel free to share your thoughts about these services or other ones that might be good as well.

I personally like birthdays for a lot of reasons, and not just because of the presents, even though those are nice to get as well.  However, it’s nice to be acknowledged, and with the use of social sites today, there is a lot more of that. For example, sign into Facebook and I get dozens of birthday greetings from people that I had never gotten them from before. This is a nice way of connecting and feeling special. I used to be happy just getting  call or two from a friend or family member, but not I can expect to get dozens of birthday wishes over a couple of days. Greetings come in from various sites where my birthday is posted for public view.

I also like birthdays because it’s a time to reflect on what has happened over the past year and gives a marker for helping to see what we’ve done.  I personally like to reflect on the things I’ve accomplished, places I’ve visited, people I’ve seen, and things I’ve learned. This all helps to put into perspective how I’ve grown over the course of the year and makes me feel confident about the year ahead. Having time to reflect on the things we’ve done ensures that we’ve processed it and grew from that, which in turn makes us a better person.

I like birthdays and look forward to them every year. It’s not that I need a big party, or lots of expensive presents, but I’m happy to get them when them come.  It’s about having the chance to live a year, and to look forward to a chance to live another year and to make the most out of it.  We should cherrish our birthdays, we only get so many in our liftetime.

The following are some ideas of what to do with a blog.

1. Make a personal blog and share things in your life.

2. Make a hobby blog and share things about something you passionate about

3. Make a business blog and sharing ideas about a certain business subject

4. Make a general blog and post everything from how-tos to daily journals.

5. Make a sales blog where you are pitching a product or service

All of these things are good ideas for blogging, and some of them can actually make money in the process.  I’ve seen bloggers who just start out as something fun to do, and wind up making money in the process.  On the other hand, I’ve seen bloggers start out to make money and only end up losing it.  The best things is to blog about what you know and have fun blogging.

Happy Blogging!

‘Twas the Night Before the Super Bowl

‘Twas the night before the Super Bowl, when along the gulf shore,

Steelers fans were praying for “just one more;”

The players were nestled all snug in the sack,

With visions of the first NFL Six-Pack;

Coach Tomlin was young, but wise for his years,

So I drifted off to sleep without any fears;

When at the stadium there arose some strange chatter,

The Cardinals feared, what was the matter;

We heard “Okel Dokel”, we heard “Double Yoi,”

We jumped from our beds, our hearts jumped for joy;

He stood at the fifty with a grin ear to ear,

Steelers fans everywhere started to cheer;

Then in an instant to our surprise,

This little old man had tears in his eyes;

He went to the booth and there took his chair,

While Terrible Towels waved in the air;

Then over the airwaves came his shrill voice,

The Steelers Nation began to rejoice;

He said, “I am back, but you know I can’t stay,

I just had to see my Steelers play;

From my home up above, I have a great view,

But I wanted to celebrate here with you;

So bring on the Birds, we’ll send them a flyin’,

On the way back to Phoenix , they will be cryin’;

Ben, Hines, Troy , Jeff and all of the rest,

No matter the outcome, to me you’re the best;”

The airwaves went silent, the stadium still,

Was this just a dream, it seemed so real;

In our team we have faith, in our team we have hope,

But the game’s not the same without Myron Cope;

Written by:

A.K. Young

01-23-09

I had a couple of thoughts about the title and I’m going throw them out here. It would be nice to hear from some of you about which ones you like or if you have a suggestion of your own please feel free to write a comment.

Proposed titles for my new book about social marketing.

1. Understanding Social Marketing

2. Social Marketing 101

3. Searching Social Marketing

4. Blogs, Feeds, and Social Oh, My!

5. Your Important, Socialize It!

6. Stop Emailing, Start Socializing

7. Make Money with Social Marketing

8. Social Marketing and SEO

9. What Social Marketing Actually Matters

10. Digg It, Buzz It, Twit It, Feed It, Just Make Sure To Socialize It

I look forward to hearing any other ideas or opinions on what you think a good title for the book would be.

I’ve been using social sites for the past couple of years now, and find them very useful in my daily life.  Yes, I’m one of those people that one would be called a twitter-holic, or Facebook fiend, but in truth I get more information and stay current with more things than I ever got from traditional media and networks.  In the past, the I would use newspaper and television to get my current news, but today I can use my social networks to see what things are making news at that very moment and the ones that matter most to me.  However, I find that many social sites don’t have the ability to weed out irrelevant content, but some have found ways to keep the most relevant content upfront.

In order to truly take advantage of these networks I think it’s a good idea to exchange one’s ideas freely across the networks at the same time.  What this will do is make each site more relevant by making the content the driving force for one’s social persona.  This means that because I’ve got all of my sites linked together I think twice before posting something that I don’t think is somewhat relevant or useful to the majority of people in my network, versus just socializing things because they are there.  For example, I have a Digg, account, but I’ve got my Digg feed linked up to my Friendfeed, which posts to my Twitter, and then goes to my Facebook.  This means every time I dig a post or article, every person in my network chain will know about it.  I used to just dig anything I fancied, but now I think twice before I dig something and only mark the things that are really relevant.  In turn, this is making the Digg site better, as well as the other sites in my network chain.

This can be done across many networks, and there are various services and apps that can help generate this type of social networking without any programming knowledge.   By doing so, I think we’ll be socializing with more relevance, and in turn making the social sites more relevant.  Sites that I like to use include Digg, Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, Myspace, Buzz, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Technorati, TwitterFeed, Ning, and Mahalo.  There are many, many others, but each can be linked together and they should all support each other.  This makes socializing easy and fun, and also makes people think about what they are putting out and will generate more relevant feedback for it.