Photo from Kozinets.net

At the beginning of the semester I watched this video for my HR class. While the SEIU Head, Andy Stern, is discussing unions (which is totally unrelated to this post), he makes a few very interesting comments at the beginning of this address to the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He encourages young people to pursue what they love. He tells us that we are going through the single most profound economic revolution in world history. He also mentions that by this year (the video is from April of 2009), 25% of the American workforce will be contingent or free agents.

I’ve been thinking about Stern’s words since I first watched the video. With college graduates (and graduate students) struggling to find full time employment, entrepreneurs are springing up all over the place. I never imagined that I would be approached by anyone and asked to help them create a social media strategy. While I would love the security of a full time job with benefits, I welcome the freedom to set my own schedule and work as I see fit.

Social media is such a new and ever-changing marketing medium that a company can’t require that you have 8 or 10 years of experience before they consider you capable of consulting.  However, before you start marketing yourself as a social media consultant (which I haven’t started doing), start experimenting so that you have demonstrable experience. I am still learning and I welcome advise from social media gurus on twitter and in print!

My current favorite resources for Social Media Marketers are…

• The New Rules of Marketing and PR
• Inbound Marketing
• ProBlogger (Especially 31 days to a better blog)
• Made to Stick (not about social media, but about sticky messages– a must for any marketer!)
• Marketing Artfully

Check out these resources and if you’re interested, join me in my quest to be a free agent in the social media marketing world!

As most of you know, I’ve been doing a little business blogging here and here. Business blogging is about marketing and public relations. While anyone can set up shop and call themselves a blogger, that doesn’t mean that they understand how to write content that drives traffic and converts to sales/subscriptions/donations. Rather than just calling myself a business blogger and hoping that my blog posts drive enough traffic for my employers/potential employers to believe that I am qualified to blog, I decided to educate myself. I’ve found myself more and more interested in social media marketing and so I’ve been experimenting with it. I’ve created blogs and twitter accounts all over the place just to see what I can do with them. (Keeping all of them updated is definitely something that I cannot do!)

All of this interest drove me to read The New Rules of Marketing and PR and I am so glad I did! While the ideas in this book are not revolutionary–especially not to those of us who have been using social media for many years– the book did remind me to do some things I had not been doing and it provided a new perspective on things I was already doing.

My personal favorite chapter was on public relations. Let us not forget that, although we are writing press releases for the press, we are writing for the general public. Find a way to speak to the public that they actually understand. Scott’s best advice: If your grandmother can’t understand your press release neither will journalists (or your potential clients). Scott talks about staying away from industry catch phrases and over used words. You really just need to read the book, if you have any interest in all of this!

I love that Scott wrote this book as though it were a blog. In fact, he wrote most of it as a blog first! The conversational tone of the book makes it an easier read than some technical books that I’ve opened, skimmed through and then promptly returned to the shelf. For any aspiring community manager, social media guru or professional blogger, this is a must read. I will say that it doesn’t have some little known secret that is going to jump start your social media marketing efforts overnight. (I looked for that book…it doesn’t exist!)

In another social media marketing news…

I’ve built up quite the collection of social media and/or marketing blogs. I’ve subscribed to them using Google reader. While there’s no feasible way for me to stay up to date with all of them, I do try to spend some time on the weekends reading Chris Brogan, She-economy, Mashable and Shannon Paul’s Very Official Blog. I wonder how much time I’ll have to do that now that school is starting.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/topgold/ / CC BY 2.0

While many of my friends might think I’m the Twitter Queen, it’s only because she with the most tweets wins! The truth is, I’m still new to writing web content and using social media to promote my work. The internet is a wonderful place that not only brought us Twitter, but also bestowed upon us Twitter tools that will surely fuel my [tweeting] disease. I did some research (courtesy of the fantastic sources cited) and found terrific tweeting tools!

1. The advanced search feature allows you to use special operators such as “or” and “and” to expand your searches, just like a search engine would! (NYTimes)

2. There are desktop applications that don’t require you to open a browser window to tweet, such as Digsby. (NYTimes)

3. If you can’t openly tweet around the office you can sneak tweets using sweet applications like SpreadTweet or OutTwit that look like MS Office programs. (Nytimes)

4. TweetBeep allows you to set notifications when tweets with selected keywords are published. (NYTimes)

5. Twitter Grader and Twinfluence allow you to measure how engaged your followers are and how influential they are (respectively). These are scientific processes– take that all you haters who think Twitter is silly! (Mashable)

6. Qwitter and Twitterless let you track the followers you lose–they even tell you what you were tweeting about when you lost them. (hint  hint stop tweeting about that!) (Mashable)

7. Tweet Rank lets you track your tweet quality. Which tweets resulted in a gain [of followers] and which ones were a total loss? You’ll never know until you use it!(SociableBlog)

8. TweetScan notifies you [via email] of your @replies so you (or I) never have to worry about missing something that might stroke your (or my) Tweego! Am I allowed to make social media terms up, or am I still too new to this? (SociableBlog)

9. Twitter Local and Nearby Tweets let you search for Tweeters in certain locations. For those (like me) who write web content about local businesses and events, this is a lovely way to promote. (SociableBlog)

10. Twellow allows you to find fellow Tweeters from your industry– an efficient way of networking, if I may say so!

I leave you now with these 10 tools in hopes that you will make use of them and also share your terrific Twitter tools with me [in the comments].