Want to get the right people talking about you and your business in a flattering light?

Word of mouth marketing has always been an important vehicle for getting the word out about your business.  Social media opens up a range of opportunities for leveraging the power of word-of-mouth.

In every social media circle there are people who have more influence than others.   Whatever niche your business is in, it’s likely there are a handful of bloggers that are highly popular and influential.  There are also people who have large numbers of followers on Twitter whose tweets are retweeted with high frequency.

When one of these bloggers or Tweeters mentions your company or links to your website, the impact can be tremendous (positive or negative).  Understanding and identifying who the influential people are in your niche is important.  And it’s equally important to understand how to reach out them to build relationships that will benefit your business.  It’s also important to understand what NOT to do.

In this article, I’ve pulled together resources, tips and advice that can help you identify influential bloggers and other social media users and develop strategies to engage your targeted influencers in ways that will help you achieve your objectives.  I’ve included a special section on Blogger outreach and relations as well.  Finally, there’s a section on tools and lists to help you in your efforts.

Identifying, Targeting and Courting Key Influencers

• Influencer Handbook
  From WOMMA: Guide created by the WOMMA Influencer Council that to provide practitioners with the following information: • Definition of an influencer and influencer marketing • Types of influencers • Methods to engage and thank influencers • Guidelines for influencer self-regulation • Bibliography of influencer communication research and practice.
• The Value of Influencers: Why They Are Still Relevant for Marketing Campaigns
  From Dosh Dosh: Discussion of how influencers are still critical to your marketing campaigns in helping to develop trust and visibility for brands.
• A Poor Man’s Guide to Finding Influencers
  From The Buzz Bin: Good article from Mike Nelson on how to identify and engage top influencers within your community of interest online. It starts with finding the right keywords. For more on growing you network see our post Ultimate How To Grow Your Social Media Network.
• Courting Online Influencers
  From Paul Gillin Communications: After you’ve identified people to engage with, you need to craft an approach and an incentive that’s right for them. Here Paul author of The New Influencers: A Marketer’s Guide to the New Social Media offers some suggestions.
• Thoughts On The Influencer Audience
  From The Future Buzz: Adam Singer shares why targeting influencers is important and how to be successful in doing so.
• What Makes a Great Evangelist
  From SmartBlog: Advice from Andy Sernovitz on what to look for when identifying people who can be an evangelist for your message. Also see Andy’s book: Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking, Revised Edition
• Making Word of Mouth Marketing Work: Finding the Influencers
  From MyCustomer.com: Insights on figuring out where can you find the small group of influential customers that will facilitate word of mouth campaigns – and how you can get them to shout about your business. (Requires free registration).
  
• Where To Find Social Media Power Users
  From Search Engine Land: Gregg Finn provides a good resource to find all of those top social users that people continually speak about so you can find related power users on the social site of your choice – including Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, etc.
• Find Out the Most Influential Users on Twitter with the ReTweetability Index
  From Mashable: Jennifer Van Grove reviews Dan Zarrella’s ReTweetability Index. The ReTweetability Index isn’t just a list showing the top Twitterers or the ones with the most retweets, but a formula carefully researched to better get at the most retweetable and influential users.
• How-To: Identifying Influencers, Neutralizing Detractors
  From MarketingVOX: The attention of influencers is coveted because of their mythological ability to drive others to a given brand, whether by force of personality or strong subject knowledge. But “influencers” are not a single silver-bullet demographic. Depending on the product or service a company hopes to sell, the appropriate circle of influencers can vary. Here are some tips on locating your influencers.
• How To Engage Influential Talkers
  From SmartBlog On Social Media: Andy Sernovitz’s three simple steps to engaging influential people: 1) Make a list 2) Use multiple channels to contact them and 3) Ask.  Also see Andy’s book: Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking, Revised Edition
• 5 Ways to Use Social Media to Find B2B Influencers
  From Hubspot: Advice on finding key influencers on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Bloggers, Niche Social Networks along with tips on using the available tools available for each type of social media vehicle to connect with them.
• How to Influence Powerful Social Media Users for Traffic and Attention
  From DoshDosh: Advice for targeting and influencing those social media users – the mavens and connectors- who can help grow your traffic and brand.
• Getting People to Talk Behind Your Back
  From chrisbrogan.com: Guest post by Josh Peter on how to get the influencers in your relevant community to spread the message about your business.
• HOW TO: Measure Online Influence
  From Mashable: Micah Baldwin takes a look at how someone becomes influential and what are the metrics for measuring their influence.
• Finding and Engaging Your Brand Evangels on Facebook – Left The Box
  From Left The Box: A technique for easily finding people that are already publicizing your brand to their friends on Facebook.
• Your Weakest Links Might Just Become Your Strongest Chain
  From Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog: Beth Harte provides a different take – the benefits of targeting less influential people vs. more influential types and why the “weakest links” may be your strongest chain.
• How To Win Facebook Fans And Reach Influencers
  From Allfacebook.com: Advice for targeting and reaching out to influencers via Facebook.

Blogger Outreach and Relations

• 10 Steps to Building a Better Blogger-Relations Program
  From Brian Solis: Helpful tips on how to approach blogger relations. Advice ranges from “being knowledgeable, transparent, honest and trustworthy” to “less is more – focus on quality relationships” and much more. For more see Brian’s e-book for Kindle: The Art and Science of Blogger Relations
  
• How to Suck Up to a Blogger
  From Guy Kawaski: Guy’s terrific advice on the process of cultivating the most influential bloggers from “creating a great product” to “linking to the blogger’s blog” to “stroking them” to “making connections before you need them” and more.
• The Ogilvy PR Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics
  From the Ogilvy PR Blog: Some basic tenets of blogger outreach that the Ogilvy PR abides by when contacting bloggers on behalf of their clients.
• How To Influence ME
  From Chris Brogan: Commonsense advice (which apparently isn’t common enough) from Chris on how to make a good impression with him – from “remembering he’s human” to “being brief” and more. Also see Chris’ book: Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust
• BLOGGER RELATIONS CASE STUDIES
  From New Communications Review: Winning case studies of Blogger Relations Outreach programs from Molson, Zarafina, Graco, Kona Blue and others.
• Comparing Six Ways to Identify Top Blogs in Any Niche
  From ReadWriteWeb: How then can you identify the top blogs in a particular niche field? There are paid services you can use to identify influencers online but they are expensive and not appropriate for quick hits in a new topic. Here’s a comparison of the pros and cons of six different options that are fast and free.
• Blogger Outreach – How Not To Do It
  From Beth Kanter: Solid advice about how to NOT to pitch bloggers to write about your organization, product, service, or events. One tip: Don’t have your office intern send out canned pitches, get to know the bloggers first.
• HOW TO Pitch: Mashable
  From PR Sarah Evans: First in a series of interviews with top bloggers on the best way for public relations professionals to pitch them and increase chances of story(ies) being picked up. First interview is with Adam Ostrow, Editor in Chief, Mashable.
• 5 Things You SHOULDN’T Do When Approaching Bloggers
  From Daily Blog Tips: Rundown of things that you shouldn’t do when approaching bloggers for your networking efforts – from “asking for a link to your blog, article or service” to “declaring that their audience will be interested in your service” to “proposing a link exchange out of the blue” and more.
• Best Practices for Blogger Relations Tip Sheet
  From the Society for New Communications Research: A “Best Practices for Blogger Relations” Tip Sheet with tips such as “doing your research to understand the blogger and focus on his/her interests” to “forgetting about the A-list and find your A-list” and more. Complete tip sheet is available to SNCR members free of charge. It is also available to non-members for a $25 donation to the Society.
• How You Might View Bloggers
  From Chris Brogan: Advice on how to conduct a blogger outreach campaign directed at key influencers. Also see Chris’ book: Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust
• Can Companies Engage Independent Bloggers? Ask @RealLifeSarah
  From Hubspot: In this video, blogger Sarah Pinnix addresses the question of what marketers can do to get bloggers talking about their products.
• So How DO You Pitch a Blogger?
  From Search Engine Blog: Blogger Matt Collier provides advice on how and how not to pitch him on your company, product and/or service – from “referring to him by name” to “NOT simply sending a press release” to “actually reading his blog before pitching him” and more.
• How to Get a Blogger to Promote Your Product
  From Lifehack: Advice on what to do and what not to do when approaching influential bloggers in your niche. From “doing your research first” to “taking bloggers seriously,” this post provides solid tips on how to handle your blogger outreach.
• The Very Basics of Blogger Outreach
  From Social Mallard: Basic advice on pitching bloggers from “building the right list” to “not forgetting about niche blogs in favor of the big fish” to “researching who the bloggers really are” and more.
• 11 Things You Need To Know When Pitching to Bloggers
  From Blank Canvas: Pat Law outlines 11 things to keep in mind when pitching your company, product, service, ideas, etc. to bloggers- from “finding out who their readers are” to “joining them online (subscribe to their RSS feeds, connect with them on Twitter)” to “joining them offline” and more.
• How to Keep Bloggers from Hating You
  From IdeasOnIdeas: Nice list of tips on how you can build links with people who blog without practices the bad behaviors that might alienate them from “taking the time to get to know those you contact” to “respecting people’s choices even if they say no” to “thanking people who take the time to write something on your behalf” and more.
• 10 Tips for a Successful Blogger Outreach Campaign
  From The Caffeinated Blog: Advice on what to do to catch the attention of influential bloggers. Includes tips on identifying the right blogs, persuading the blogger that his/her audience is interested in your product/service, to being honest in how you represent yourself, being prepared to deal with negative feedback and more.
• Attention PR People: Here’s How To Pitch A Writer
  From Six Pixels of Separation: Mitch Joel includes 9 simple rules for pitching a writer from “personalizing your message” to “never sending attachments” to “not following up if you don’t hear back” and more.
• 20 Tips for Pitching Bloggers
  From The Future Buzz: Adam Singer offers up a nice long list of tips for pitching bloggers from “offer a freebie” to “offer exclusivity” to “subscribing to their blog” to “commenting on their blog” and more.
• Journalists’ Blogs Offer Valuable Clues About How to Pitch Them
  From The Publicity Hound’s Blog: Joan Stewart offers advice on how to mine journalists’ blogs, twitter pages and more to uncover clues on how to target your pitches to them.
• How to Launch a Successful Blogger Outreach Program in One Day
  From The Viral Garden: Hour-by-hour step-by-step process for putting together a blogger outreach program. Key part of the process is creating a list of at least 20 bloggers who are talking about your company and posting comments on their blogs in response to their posts that reference our company.
• For advice on Mommy Bloggers:
  • 7 Things Mom Bloggers Want To Say To PR People
    From Influential Marketing Blog: Rohit Bhargava shares the top 7 things he’s gleaned from conversations with mom bloggers that most of them want PR people to know – from “get to know me” to “stop asking for free coverage” to”remember I have kids” to “don’t tell me what to write” and more.
  • Some Advice on Reaching Out to Mommy Bloggers
    From Media Bullseye: Susan Getgood talks about who mommy bloggers are and offers up some tips for connecting with them effectively including advice on how to find the ones who will be interested in what you have to offer.

Tools and Lists

• Alltop
  Fantastic must-have resource for identifying top blogs/bloggers in any niche.
• Traackr Helps Marketers Find Influential Voices Online
  From Mashable: Review of Traackr’s Online Authority List product that makes it easier for PR folks, brand managers, and marketers to easily identify the top online influential voices — tracking reach, resonance, and relevance — around their specific campaign initiatives.
• The Twitalyzer for Tracking Influence and Measuring Success in Twitter
  Twitalyzer is a unique tool to evaluate the activity of any Twitter user and report on relative influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity, clout, and other useful measures of success in social media.
• TwitterCounter – Top Tweeters
  Top 100 most-followered Twitter Users
• Twinfluence – Twitter Influence Analyzer
  TwInfluence allows you to measure Twitter influencers, not just by followers, but also by reach, velocity, social capital and centralization. It also publicly ranks the top 50 influencers in each category. This is an important tool for identifying the tastemakers that you don’t already know in the Twitterverse.
• TopLinked People on LinkedIn
  Listing of the top (by numbers of connections) LinkedIn networkers and their number of connections.
• Retweetist – Users
  Updated list of the Top 50 Most Retweeted Users.
• 50 Most Influential Powerful Women in Social Media
  Form Immediate Influence Blog: List of 50 of the most powerful and influential women in Social Media with links to their websites.
• 50 Most Powerful and Influential Men in Social Media
  From Immediate Influence Blog: A list of the 50 Most Powerful & Influential Men in Social Media:
• Social Media Power Users And Influencers: Part 1
  From Social Media Buzz: First in a multi-part series on the key influencers in social media on the web along with their Blog info, Twitter info, brief bios and what makes them influencers.  For others parts of the series: Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.

Finally, if you’d like a contrarian opion on this, read this  Brand Week interview with Columbia University professor Duncan Watts who argues that influencers aren’t really all that important.  Do you agree?

Want your tweets to be more compelling? Want to be a better writer on the social web?   Me too!

The advent of social media has opened up a wide range of opportunities for non-professional writers like me — and probably you too — to write online.  Most of us writing for websites or blogs or posting on Twitter likely aren’t trained journalists.  Even professional writers trained for print must learn to adapt their writing style to an online audience who experiences content differently than a print audience.

And social media itself has changed writing online – making it more informal and personal.  In fact, when you’re writing online these days, you’re writing not only for your audience but also for search engines and social media sites.  Add Twitter to the equation and the need to communicate with only 140 characters raises writing for the social web to a new art form.

In this post, we’ve pulled together a collection of articles with advice on writing for Twitter and the social web.  We’ve organized these articles into the following topics -  general online writing principles, writing strong headlines, writing for Twitter, and writing for search engines.

Let me know if you have any ideas or tips that have worked for you.

General Web and Social Media Writing Principles

• How Users Read On The Web
  From Jakob Nielsen: Advice on how people read on the web compared to how they read print publications.  One difference- people don’t read on the web, they scan and this requires a different writing style vs. print.
• How to Write for the Web
  From Knight Digital Media Center: Blogs, wikis and discussion boards dissolve the barrier between writer and reader, creating a more informal and interactive writing environment. Take advantage of this opportunity and distinguish yourself by writing in a clean, active, conversational style that will make your readers feel as comfortable reading your words as they feel when talking with a close friend. Here’s some advice on how to do this with social media.
• From Print to Web: Tips for the Transitioning Writer
  From Web Worker Daily: The web, and its readers, demands a different kind of writing, delivered in a different way. Here are some tips and resources to help get a handle on just what kind of change is required.
• Writing Style for Print vs. Web
  From Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox: Nielsen’s classic advice on writing for the web compared to writing for print.
• 10 Tips on Writing the Living Web: A List Apart
  From A List Apart:  Writing for dynamic web sites that are consulting changes (think blogs, wikis, community sites) requires a different approach than writing for static websites.  Here are 10 tips that can help with the reality of writing when things are always changing..

• 5 Rules for Better Web Writing
  From Mashable: Josh Catone provides 5 rules to be a better writer on the web from “knowing your objective” to “knowing your audience” to “keeping it short” to “making it scannable” to “embracing constraints.”

• Reading on the Web (Alertbox)
  From Jakob Nielsen: People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences. In research on how people read websites we found that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word. (Update: a newer study found that users read email newsletters even more abruptly than they read websites.)
• How Web Is Different from Print
  From Gerry McGovern: Of all the things that make the Web different from print, linking is the most important. Are we tool-making animals or are we animals made by tools? It’s an old question. How much did the quill shape our minds and worlds? We invented the printing press which then invented a new society, a new way of thinking.  Also read Gerry’s Traditional Writing Skills Don’t Work on Web – a discussion of why the type of writing many of us were taught doesn’t translate online and results in content that is overwritten with too much content and context and too little focus on action.
• The Ultimate Blogger Writing Guide
  From Copyblogger: Eight important writing tips as they apply to blogging
• Blog Users Don’t Read, They Scan… Write Accordingly
  From Social Media Today: Post by Michael Gass with useful advice on writing for your blog.
• 5 Simple Ways to Open Your Blog Post With a Bang
  From Copyblogger: 5 ways to open your post that will capture the reader’s imagination and pull them deeper into your content.
• Webpage Copy Writing – Web Site Resources, Website Tips – WebsiteTips.com
  The tutorials below cover how visitors read content on the Web and how to write effectively for the Web. See also below for specific topics: Writing ‘About Us’ Content for the Web and Writing Headlines and Titles for the Web.
• Writing Well for the Web – webreference.com
  From Web Reference:  Quick and easy tips for non-writers who are getting started on the web.
• What Bloggers Can Learn From Journalists
  From Chrisbrogan.com: Guest post by Anita Bruzzese with advice on web writing for bloggers based on her perspective as a trained journalist.
• 30 Ways to Increase Readability Online
  From Pro Blog Design: Tips for making your blog content more readable.
• “Inverted Pyramid”: How to Write for Social News & Blogs
  From 97 Floor: Advice on writing for readers of Digg, Stumbleupon, Rss Subscribers and other social media users.
• How To Write for Blogs and Social Media: New Media, New Rules!
  In this video, Green Industry Speaker, Video Blogger, Internet Marketer, and Consultant Jeff Korhan explains how to write for Blogs and Social Media to accomplish your purpose.
• 10 Tips for Making Your Blog Posts More del.icio.us
  From Vandelay Website Design: Steps to take to encourage users to save and share your articles on the social bookmarking site Delicious in order to drive website traffic – including how you write the content itself.
• The 6 Cs of Killer Web Writing
  From Gerry McGovern: Rundown of six ‘C’s to keep in mind when you sit down to write: Who Cares? Is it Compelling? Is it Clear? Is it Complete? Is it Concise? Is it Correct?
• How to Write Copy for Short Attention Spans
  From Copyblogger: Advice from Sherice Jacob on writing in fast-paced world where the majority of people will only read the first few lines of what you write.

• Internet-Age Writing Syllabus and Course Overview
  McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Robert Lanham offers a hilarious take on writing in the Internet age.

Writing Strong Headlines and Titles

• 25 Action Words for Writing a Newsworthy Headline
  From PR Leap Blog: A list of 25 action words and 25 sample headlines from the pressrooms of Apple Computers, Yahoo!, Google, IBM and T-Mobile:
• How to Craft Post Titles that Draw Readers Into Your Blog
  From Problogger: Solid discussion of why blog post titles matter and 8 tips for creating successful blog titles.
• How To Write Great Headlines
  From Modern Life is Rubbish: Whether you’re a blogger, a journalist or social bookmarker, writing a great headline is a must if you want to capture your reader’s interest. Faced with an ever increasing wave of blogs, RSS subscriptions, and links, the headline is more important now than it ever has been.
• Headline writing: How web and print headlines differ
  From New Media Bytes: Review of how headlines are different for print vs. the web and a review of best practices for writing headlines for people, search engines and social media.
• 10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas That Work
  From Copyblogger: Ideas for attention-grabbing headlines you can use with your blog posts
• Writing Better Web Page Titles
  From Social Patterns: One of the easiest things you can do to optimize a web page is to write a better title for it. Aside from writing great content, learning how to write better titles is the best thing you can do for your web page. Here’s some advice on how to do this.
• How to Write Magnetic Headlines
  From Copyblogger: Excellent series of posts on writing headlines for your blog or website articles.
• 10 Blog Post Title Templates That Work Like Gangbusters
  From BlogBuildingU: A dozen compelling blog post title templates to get you more clicks and readers.
• Write Great Titles For Your Blog Posts
  From Master New Media: How to write blog titles that will get you greater visibility and exposure on major search engines.
• How To Craft Kick-Ass Title Tags & Headlines
  From SEO Book: Advice on strategies for writing headlines that will help you with your search engine optimization.
• 8 Ways of Creating Compelling Blog Post Titles
  From Content Writing and Copywriting Blog: 8 steps you can take to create compelling blog post titles
• Writing Killer Web Headings and Links
  From Gerry McGovern: Advice on getting the first couple of words exactly right when attempting to write effective web headings and links.

Writing for Twitter

• Copywriting for Twitter: 10 ways to make every tweet count
  From Econsultancy: With a massive amount of tweets posted every second, here’s some advice for making sure your tweets are heard through all the noise.
• Everything I Need to Know About Twitter I Learned in J School
  From Mashable: Anne Handley, Editor in Chief of MarketingProfs does a fantastic job of showing how the tenets of good journalism can be applied to writing effectively for Twitter- from “making every word count” to “keeping it simple” to “providing context” and more.
• How to Write a Twitter-Worthy Headline
  From SmartBlog On Social Media: Andy Sernovitz serves up his tips on writing strong Twitter headlines that will be re-tweeted- from “telling the complete story in the headline” to “using copywriter tricks – compelling terms like ‘how-to’ and ‘3 tips’ that will help get your tweets forwarded” and more.
• 15 Kick-Ass Retweet Tips for Writers
  From Econsultancy: Some suggested techniques that writers and bloggers – not to mention traditional journalists – can adopt to improve the retweetability of their articles – from using “awesome adjectives” to “leaving a little extra space for the retweeter to append the tweet with a comment” and more.
• An Unofficial Twitter Style Guide
  From Grammar Girl: Tips for better Twitter postings.
• How to get ReTweeted – The Formula
  From Twitips: In this post Louise Doherty (@louisedoherty) shares a formula to help you increase the chances of being ReTweeted.
• 6 Ways to Maximize the Use of Your 140 Characters
  From Twitips: Mark Fulton provides some tips for making the most of those few characters you get to use when using Twitter (140 to be exact).
• How to write Twitter-friendly Headlines
  From Brian Armsey: A few tips on Twitter-optimized headline writing.
• The Art of Writing Great Twitter Headlines
  From Copyblogger: Advice from Brian Clark on writing compelling headlines on Twitter from headlines. One piece of advice – craft headlines that promise readers a compelling reward by offering something “useful to the reader” or providing readers with a “sense of urgency.”

Writing for Search Engines

• SEO Copywriting 2.0
  From Copyblogger: An SEO Copywriting 2.0 tutorial designed to provide a step-by-step strategy for creating content that scores links and ranks well in search engines in five easy lessons.
• Google & SEO Friendly Page Titles
  From SEO Book: Video and article with tips on creating search friendly page titles for your web pages.
• This Boring Headline Is Written for Google
  From New York Times: Discussion of writing good web headlines to help with SEO.
• Use Old Words When Writing for Findability
  From Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox: Advice on why you should use familiar words to increase your odds of people finding your content via search engines.
• Working Words: How to Write for SEO
  From Econsultancy: Nice post that explores best practices in SEO copywriting.
• Writing Killer Web Headings and Links
  From Gerry McGovern: Advice on getting the first couple of words exactly right when attempting to write effective web headings and links.
• The Top 10 Twitter SEO Tips
  From Mashable: How to write your tweets to ensure they rank well in Google search results.

Any Kindle users out there?

I’m waiting for my new Kindle DX to arrive.  It’s on backorder and I’m expecting it in a couple of weeks.

In the meantime, I’ve been researching & keeping a list of books I want to download once it arrives.  While doing my research, I’ve discovered there are many good social media books available in Kindle format.  I’ve pulled together a list of social media books I’ve found so far in the Kindle store.  If you have a Kindle- you may want to check them out.

One of the really neat features of the Kindle DX is the built in PDF reader.  So in addition to being able to download Kindle format books, I’ll be able to use my new Kindle for PDF files.  This is a feature I’m really excited to use!  In addition to Kindle books available for purchase, I’ve also included a section at the end that provides some compiled lists of free eBooks on Social Media topics, many of which are in PDF format. While there is some duplication between lists, I thought each list useful enough to post separately.

Unfortunately, there’s one social media book I’d like to read available for pre-order but not yet available in eBook format for the Kindle  — though the book’s author would like it to be.  As Chris Brogan tweeted recently, help him get his book Trust Agents available in Kindle format by clicking on the link below the book cover to tell the publisher you want this book on Kindle.

Let me know in the comments section if you know of or find any other good PDFs or Kindle books that I’ve missed on the topic of social media!

Social Media Basics

Common Craft E-Books on Social Media: From Lee and Sachi LeFever of Common Craft: Makers of the fabulous Plain English videos present series of ebooks about Social Media:

• Social Media in Plain English
• Blogs in Plain English
• Podcasting in Plain English
• Twitter in Plain English
• Social Networking in Plain English

Social Media Marketing Strategies

• Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business
  By Larry Weber: An updated and expanded Second Edition of the popular guide to social media for the business community. Marketers must look to the Web for new ways of finding customers and communicating with them, rather than at them. From Facebook and YouTube to blogs and Twittering, social media on the Internet is the most promising new way to reach customers. Marketing to the Social Web, Second Edition helps marketers and their companies understand how to engage customers, build customer communities, and maximize profits in a time of marketing confusion. Author and social media guru Larry Weber describes newly available tools and platforms, and shows you how to apply them to see immediate results and growth.
• Word of Mouth Marketing, Revised Edition
  By Andy Sernovitz: Who Is Talking About You?Master the art of word of mouth marketing with this practical hands-on guide.With straightforward advice and humor, marketing expert Andy Sernovitz will show you how the world-s most respected and profitable companies get their best customers for free through the power of word of mouth.
• The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly
  By David Meerman Scott: For marketers, The New Rules of Marketing and PR shows you how to leverage the potential that Web-based communication offers your business. Finally, you can speak directly to customers and buyers, establishing a personal link with the people who make your business work. This one-of-a-kind guide includes a step-by-step action plan for harnessing the power of the Internet to create compelling messages, get them in front of customers, and lead those customers into the buying process.
• Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day
  By Dave Evans and Susan Bratton: If the idea of starting a social media marketing campaign overwhelms you, Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day will introduce you to the basics, demonstrate how to manage details and describe how you can track results. Case studies, step-by-step guides, checklists, quizzes and hands-on tutorials will help you execute a social media marketing campaign in just one hour a day. In addition, learn how to integrate social media metrics with traditional media measurements and how to leverage blogs, RSS feeds, podcasts, and user-generated content sharing sites like YouTube.
• Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
  By Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff: When consumers you’ve never met are rating your company s products in public forums with which you have no experience or influence, your company is vulnerable. In Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester, Inc. explain how to turn this threat into an opportunity.
• Advertising 2.0: Social Media Marketing in a Web 2.0 World
  By Tracy L. Tuten: Professor and advertising pro Tracy L. Tuten shows old-line marketers how to take advantage of the newfangled concepts and tools Web 2.0 enables.
• Social Media is a Cocktail Party by Jim Tobin, Lisa Braziel (Book) in Business & Economics
  By Jim Tobin and Lisa Braziel: An essential read for any marketer looking to understand how blogs, podcasts, social networks and other Web 2.0 tools can help you connect on a deeper level with your customers and prospects.
• SocialCorp: social Media Goes Corporate
  By Joel Postman: This book will help companies of all sizes develop and implement a strategy to become a SocialCorp, a company that has adopted social media intelligently and effectively, in a way that does not compromise the company’s primary obligations as a corporation. Using case studies and analysis of available social media tools, and proven corporate social media strategies, the book will help corporate communicators understand the new communications landscape, the power of social media, and how to adopt it intelligently in a corporate environment.
• Putting the Public Back in Public Relations: How Social Media Is Reinventing the Aging Business of PR
  By Deirdre Breakenridge and Brian Solis: Drawing on their unparalleled experience making Social Media work for business, the authors show you how to transform the way you think, plan, prioritize, and deliver PR services. You’ll learn new ways to build the relationships that matter, and reach a new generation of influencers…leverage platforms ranging from Twitter to Facebook…truly embed yourself in the communities that are shaping the future.
• Content Nation: Surviving and Thriving as Social Media Changes Our Work, Our Lives, and Our Future
  By John Blossom: Find out how social media communications is changing the content provider industry in Content Nation: Surviving and Thriving as Social Media Technology Changes Our Lives and Our Future. Developed through a collaborative wiki, this book is a collection of information from social media experts and serves as an example of how social media impacts the way we provide and receive content. You will learn how social media changes the way businesses market products and services, influences how people interact with the government, and dictates how we communicate with one another on a personal level.
• Mommy, Where Do Customers Come From?: How to Market to a New World of Connected Customers
  By Larry Bailin: Today’s connected customers now more than ever are hyper aware of the many choices they have; customers today are more demanding and less loyal than times in the past. This presents a special challenge to businesses, to marketers trying to keep up with changes in customer behavior, technology and trends. Based on Larry Bailin’s popular seminar of the same title, Mommy, Where Do Customers Come From? details the changes in approach necessary to successfully market and sell products and services to your connected customers.
• Social Marketing Success in Under 30 Minutes a Day
  By Andrea Kalli: This E-Book will tell you what you need to set up, plus tips to help you get the most out of the various social media sites and services, free tools to make your life easier, things you need to watch out for, plus the reasons why you’re doing this, links to additional resources, tools to help speed up the process, social marketing news, and more.
• Tactical Transparency: How Leaders Can Leverage Social Media to Maximize Value and Build their Brand
  By John C. Havens & Shel Holtz: While exposing the risks inherent in maintaining a nontransparent relationship with customers, Tactical Transparency provides a methodology that will help your organization create its unique plan to bring greater authenticity to your company and your brands. Drawn largely from interviews with leaders in companies that have achieved measurable success in this arena, authors Shel Holtz and John C. Havens provide step-by-step details on how executives and professional communicators can create a transparency strategy that will keep their organization competitive in the twenty-first century.
• Mom 3.0: Marketing WITH Today’s Mothers by Leveraging New Media & Technology
  By Maria T. Bailey: Meet Mom 3.0. She is a powerful consumer who not only purchases products, but influences the decision making process of her peers through the use of new media, technology and content that is relevant, intuitive and delivers her and her peers ecosystems of solutions. Marketers must market with today’s $2.1 trillion Mom Market to capture her spending. Learn how to engage Mom Influencers using blogs, vlogs, podcasts, mobile devices and more to grow sales, build brand loyalty and generate buzz.
• Free
  By Chris Anderson: The New York Times bestselling author heralds the future of business in Free. In his revolutionary bestseller, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson demonstrated how the online marketplace creates niche markets, allowing products and consumers to connect in a way that has never been possible before. Now, in Free, he makes the compelling case that in many instances businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them.
• The Age of Engage: Reinventing Marketing for Today’s Connected, Collaborative, and Hyperinteractive Culture
  By Denise Shiffman: Marketing has undergone a cataclysmic shift. Blogs, comment sites, and social networks have given your audience unprecedented power in their relationship with you and your products. In The Age of Engage, widely respected marketing strategist Denise Shiffman lays out a provocative blueprint for how to succeed in this new era.
• New Language of Marketing 2.0, The
  By Sandy Carter: Today, marketers have an array of radically new Web 2.0-based techniques at their disposal: viral marketing, social networking, virtual worlds, widgets, Web communities, blogs, podcasts, and next-generation search, to name just a few. Now, leading IBM marketing innovator Sandy Carter introduces ANGELS, a start-to-finish framework for choosing the right Web 2.0 marketing tools—and using them to maximize revenue and profitability.
• Here Comes Everybody
  From Clay Shirky: One of the culture’s wisest observers of the transformational power of the new forms of tech-enabled social interaction is Clay Shirky of NYU’s Interactive Telcommunications Program and Here Comes Everybody is his marvelous reckoning with the ramifications of all this on what we do and who we are.
• Join the Conversation: How to Engage Marketing-Weary Consumers with the Power of Community, Dialogue, and Partnership
  by Joseph Jaffe: With the continued fragmentation of the media and proliferation of media options, the balance of power has shifted from the marketer to the individual. In Join the Conversation, Jaffe discusses the changing role of the consumer and how marketers must adapt by joining the rich, deep and meaningful conversation already in progress. This book reveals what marketers must do to become a welcome and invited part of the dialogue, and how to leverage and integrate the resulting partnership in ways that provide win-win situations for businesses, brands and lives.
• Plug Your Business! Marketing on MySpace, YouTube, blogs and podcasts and other Web 2.0 social networks
  By Steve Weber: No matter what kind of business you have, its success depends on two things: It must serve a need, and you must find customers. Most new businesses fail simply because the right people never heard about them. And this is the paradox for entrepreneurs: People aren’t paying attention to traditional marketing and advertising anymore. But free advertising is alive and well. Whatever you want to call it — buzz, word of mouth, peer-to-peer or viral marketing — you can’t just manufacture it. You must earn it — by engaging your target market.
• Companies and Communities: Participating without being sleazy
  By Dawn M. Foster: Companies and Communities is focused on helping your company get real business value out of participating in online communities and social media. This 80 page eBook contains practical advice and suggestions for how companies can engage with online communities and social media sites.
• Unleashing Web 2.0: From Concepts to Creativity
  by Gottfried Vossen & Stephan Hagemann: The emergence of Web 2.0 is provoking challenging questions for developers: What products and services can our company provide to customers and employees using Rich Internet Applications, mash-ups, Web feeds or Ajax? Which business models are appropriate and how do we implement them? What are best practices and how do we apply them? If you need answers to these and related questions, you need this book-a comprehensive and reliable resource that guides you into the emerging and unstructured landscape that is Web 2.0.
• Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide
  From Amy Shuen: Web 2.0 makes headlines, but how does it make money? This concise guide explains what’s different about Web 2.0 and how those differences can improve the bottom line. Whether you’re an executive, a small business owner, or an entrepreneur, Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide illustrates through real life examples how various businesses are creating new opportunities on today’s Web. This book is about strategy rather than the technology itself.

Blogging

• Publish and Prosper: Blogging for Your Business
  By Steve Broback: Written from the business person/designer’s perspectives, this book shows how businesses can leverage current, real-world blogging techniques, tools, and platforms to promote and enhance their ventures. The key idea is that the conversation with your market is stronger and more meaningful with a blog. Filled with practical information and a how-to approach, this book provides case studies of companies as large as Boeing or General Motors and as small as Clip-’n-seal. Readers will learn about the types of business blogs, how companies use blogs, how to sell blogs to management and IT, effective blog design, content, and conversation, pitfalls to avoid, how to develop Web presence, and more.
• Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World’s Top Bloggers
  By Michael A. Banks: Among more than 102,000,000 blogs, a few stand out as influential, ground-breaking, and singularly successful. These thirty bloggers, who write about everything from business trends to parenting, have been featured in Wired magazine, Popular Science, and on CNN, NPR, MSNBC, and 20/20. In one-on-one conversations with Michael A. Banks, these innovative, creative thinkers have shared their tactics, their philosophies, what drives them, how they mine for subject matter, and their personal secrets for success. Come and learn from the masters.
• WordPress For Dummies
  By Lisa Sabin-Wilson: Are you a wannabe blogger? A seasoned pro migrating your blog to WordPress? Looking to do more cool stuff with your existing WordPress blog? Then this fun guide is for you! WordPress for Dummies is a veritable smorgasbord of WordPress information, ideas, tools, resources, and instruction on everything you need to create and maintain your dream blog.
• ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income
  By Darren Rowse: Rowse’s blog Problogger.net is where bloggers worldwide go for advice and information on enhancing their blog’s presence. Whether you’re just starting out or have been blogging for years, these two professional bloggers show you how to turn your passion for blogging into extra revenue. This practical guide to creating and marketing a blog with the potential for generating a six-figure income shows you how to choose subject matter that works for you, handle technical issues, and evaluate your blog?s success so that you can use your blog to generate income indirectly.
• Building a WordPress Blog People Want to Read
  By Scott McNulty: From picking a theme and using tags to choosing widgets and building a community, creating your blog really starts after you set it up. In this book by blogger extraordinaire Scott McNulty, you learn how to do all of this and more.

Podcasting and Video/YouTube

• Podcast Academy: The Business Podcasting Book: Launching, Marketing, and Measuring Your Podcast
  By Michael Geoghegan: Exclusive Podcast Academy training now available in a book!Podcast Academy, the leader in audio/video podcast and new media education, brings you their first book, Podcast Academy: The Business Podcasting Book, based on their seminars. Written by industry experts, this book brings you practical experience that you can apply to your own business. It covers planning, content creation, legal considerations, branding, marketing, advertising, monetization, and much more.
• How to Do Everything with Podcasting
  By Shel Holtz & Neville Hobson: Reach a targeted and influential audience using the medium that’s gone from underground scene to mainstream. How to Do Everything with Podcasting walks you, step by step, through the process of creating, broadcasting, and promoting your own podcast. You’ll get tips for targeting your audience, refining your content, integrating various technologies, and profiting from your podcast.
• YouTube for Business
  From Michael Miller: To any businessperson or marketing professional, YouTube’s 20 million+ viewers are a tempting target. How can you tap into the potential of YouTube to promote your business and sell your products or services? In this book you’ll learn how to. The answers in YouTube for Business show you how to make YouTube part of your online marketing plan–and drive traffic to your company’s website.

Social Networks, Community and Wikis

• Facebook Marketing
  By Steve Holzner: With more than 80,000,000 affluent, savvy members, Facebook is today’s fastest-growing marketing opportunity! But traditional marketing methods won’t work here. In Facebook Marketing, best-selling author Steven Holzner reveals new social marketing techniques that do work, and shows you exactly how to make the most of them. Using true case studies, Holzner introduces powerful new techniques from today’s smartest Facebook marketers…and helps you avoid pitfalls that can cost you money and credibility. No matter what business you’re in, you’ll learn how to create bottom-up, “viral” Facebook marketing programs that achieve maximum results at minimum cost!
• Facebook Era, The: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff
  By Clara Shih: Online social networks are fundamentally changing the way we live, work, and interact. They offer businesses immense opportunities to transform customer relationships for profit: opportunities that touch virtually every business function, from sales and marketing to recruiting, collaboration to executive decision-making, product development to innovation. In The Facebook Era, Clara Shih systematically outlines the business promise of social networking and shows how to transform that promise into reality.
• Managing Online Forums: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run Successful Community Discussion Boards
  By Patrick O’Keefe: Every day, millions of users log on to their favorite online forums and inter­act with others to get advice and discuss everything from the latest news and trends to their hobbies to their professions to whatever else strikes their fancy. Admin­istrators have to lead these communities, deal with difficult users, and choose moderators. Legal constraints, spammers, and technical issues can turn the excitement of running an online community into chaos. With the right guidance, however, running forums can be a pleasure. Patrick O’Keefe has spent years developing and managing online communities. Now, he shows readers how to make the right decisions about every aspect of their forums
• 18 Rules of Community Engagement : A Guide for Building Relationships and Connecting With Customers Online
  By Angela Connor: This book empowers community managers and encourages corporate leaders looking to build social media strategies to get involved in the online conversation. It is a playbook for those interested in creating online communities on exactly what it takes to be successful. After reading this book, you will learn how to start discussions and bring people together online through various tactics on multiple platforms. You will also have practical tips that can be implemented immediately, regardless of their age of your community or stage of its development.
• The Truth About Profiting from Social Networking
  by Patrice-Anne Rutledge: Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, & beyond: “social network” your way to success, step by step! This book reveals 50 Proven Social Networking Principles and bite-size, easy-to-use techniques that work.
• I’m on LinkedIn–Now What??? (Second Edition): A Guide to Getting the Most Out of LinkedIn
  By Jason Alba: Designed to help you get the most out this popular business networking site. This new edition follows the best-selling first edition and includes the latest and great approaches for using LinkedIn. With over 32 million members there is a lot of potential to find and develop relationships to help in your business and personal life, but many professionals find themselves wondering what to do once they signup. This book explains the different benefits of the system and recommends best practices (including LinkedIn Groups) so that you can get the most out of LinkedIn.
• I’m on Facebook–Now What???: How to Get Personal, Business, and Professional Value from Facebook
  By Jason Alba and Jesse Stay: Facebook is one of the hottest websites in today’s world, and is having a major impact on career and business. This book explains the different parts of Facebook and helps you understand how you can get the most out of your Facebook account. It helps you understand what you could or should do in Facebook to further your career, business, or job.
• Wikinomics
  By Dan Tapscott: Based on a $9 million research project led by bestselling author Don Tapscott, Wikinomics shows how masses of people can participate in the economy like never before. They are creating TV news stories, sequencing the human genome, remixing their favorite music, designing software, finding a cure for disease, editing school texts, inventing new cosmetics, or even building motorcycles.
• The Social Network Business Plan: 18 Strategies That Will Create Great Wealth
  By David Silver: In The Social Network Business Plan, social network expert, David Silver presents and explains 18 cutting-edge methods to create revenue for social network websites–none of which are advertising.

Twitter

• 99 Ways To Make Money Using Twitter
  By The Editors Of Geekpreneur: Produced by entrepreneurial blog Geekpreneur (www.geekpreneur.com), creators of the popular Geek’s Guide to Twitter, the book covers methods as varied as TwitPitching, app-building, trend-spotting and affiliate selling, and is filled with practical ideas for everyone.
• The Twitter Book
  By Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein: This practical guide will teach you everything you need to know to quickly become a Twitter power user, including strategies and tactics for using Twitter’s 140-character messages as a serious–and effective–way to boost your business. Co-written by Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein, widely followed and highly respected Twitterers, the practical information in The Twitter Book is presented in a fun, full-color format that’s packed with helpful examples and clear explanations.
• Twitter Power: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time
  By Joel Comm: In Twitter Power, Internet marketing and Web innovation expert Joel Comm shows businesses and marketers how to integrate Twitter into their existing marketing strategies to build a loyal following among Twitter members, expand awareness for their product or service, and even handle negative publicity due to angry or disappointed consumers. The book also presents case studies of companies on the forefront of the Twitter movement, to help you develop your own social networking strategies.
• Twitter Revolution: How Social Media and Mobile Marketing is Changing the Way We Do Business & Market Online
  By Deborah Micek: This book is designed to help show everyone from the small business owner to the CEO of a large corporation; from work at home moms to politicians in Washington, DC how they can participate in the fastest growing social network and micro-blogging revolution taking place right now. Join us on Twitter!

Social Media in the Organization

• Social Media at Work: How Networking Tools Propel Organizational Performance
  
  by Arthur L. Jue, Jackie Alcalde Marr, Mary Ellen Kassotakis: Today’s networking technologies-wikis, blogs, and social networking sites-are changing how we build professional relationships and work collaboratively. In this insightful book, three organizational development experts from Oracle Corporation offer executives down-to-earth strategies for leveraging the power of social media to build more effective and agile organizations, engage employees, and sustain competitiveness.

Lists of Free E-Books

• 15 Free Social Media White Papers and Ebooks from Mashable (Cameron Chapman)
• 25 Free Social Media Marketing & SEO Ebooks, White Papers + Other Downloads from SEOptimise (Tad Chef)
• Top 25 Free eBooks on Social Media from Social Media Core
• 20 Free eBooks About Social Media from Chris Brogan

Image Source: Richard Masoner

Facebook’s vanity URL feature – particularly for Facebook pages – is of particular interest to businesses.  As Facebook continues it’s explosive growth heading towards 250 million active users, more and more businesses are hoping to leverage Facebook for serious business purposes.   Facebook’s new feature allows businesses to create a custom url for their business page – something that wasn’t possible until now. (If you haven’t gotten your custom name, read Facebook expert Mari Smith’s post: How To Secure Your Facebook Username (Vanity URL).)

Want to sharpen your skills and learn how to really leverage Facebook to grow your business?

Below I’ve put together a comprehensive collection of resources, tips and advice on how to use Facebook for business purposes including:

1. General Guides, Tutorials and Help
2. Facebook Pages and Groups
3. Events and Causes
4. Tips and advice from a range of experts for making the most of Facebook
5. Advice for Non-Profits
6. Other Facebook tools, applications & features (including Facebook Connect)
7. Facebook Statistics

Let us know if there are any resources we’ve missed.

Comprehensive Guides and How-To’s

• How To Use Facebook for Business
  From Hubspot: Free downloadable 22 page E-book – very comprehensive with advice on setting up your profiles, setting up/promoting a business page, groups vs. pages, setting up a group, advertising on Facebook and measuring/analyzing.
• Facebook for Grownups
  From Butterscotch- 10 part video with step-by-step instructions for how to sign up for Facebook and how to create a Facebook profile.
• Facebook Help Center - official Facebook Help
• Facebook’s Complete Privacy Presentation
  From Mashable: Check out all the details provided by Facebook on their new privacy settings.
• Books:
  • The Facebook Marketing Bible: The Guide To Marketing Your Brand, Company, Product, Or Service Inside Facebook
    From Justin Smith: Provides an introduction to what’s possible on Facebook to the spectrum of marketers from brand advertisers to volunteer grassroots evangelists. The Facebook Marketing Bible contains three detailed sections: Tools for Guerilla Marketers, Tools for Advertisers, and Tools for Application Developers. Each part outlines the best available channels and strategies for reaching your audience inside Facebook.
  • Facebook Marketing: Leverage Social Media to Grow Your Business
    From Steven Holzner: In Facebook Marketing, best-selling author Steven Holzner reveals new social marketing techniques that do work, and shows you exactly how to make the most of them. Using true case studies, Holzner introduces powerful new techniques from today’s smartest Facebook marketers…and helps you avoid pitfalls that can cost you money and credibility.
  • I’m on Facebook–Now What???: How to Get Personal, Business, and Professional Value from Facebook
    From Jason Alba, Jesse Stay, Robert Scoble and Lee Lorenzen: This book explains the different parts of Facebook and helps you understand how you can get the most out of your Facebook account. It helps you understand what you could or should do in Facebook to further your career, business, or job.

Facebook Pages and Groups

• Facebook | Pages
  Official Facebook Page that walks you through the steps of preparing and setting up a Facebook Page. Also links to Facebook Ads to find new fans.
• Facebook Pages Product Guide
  Official Facebook PDF document providing an overview of how to use the new Public Profile Pages.
• 7 Tips To Getting Started On Facebook For New Businesses
  From Krishna De’s BizGrowth News: Basics for new businesses who want to get started with a Facebook Page to build their brand online.  Includes tips on registering your Facebook page, choosing keywords, creating an about page, setting a default page, designing the look of your profile, setting privacy setting and finding fans.
• Should a Facebook Page Be Part of Your Digital Marketing Strategy?
  From Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog: Paul Chaney explores advantages and disadvantages of using Facebook as part of a marketing strategy. Also looks at Groups, Events and personal profiles for businesses.
• Facebook Pages vs Facebook Groups: What’s the Difference?
  From Mashable: Howard Greenstein clarifies the difference between Facebook’s Pages vs. Groups and reviews the factors you should consider when choosing which is right for your organization.
• Facebook Group and Brand Pages Best Practices
  From Social Media Explorer: Review of best practices for organizations who want to create group and/or brand pages on Facebook.
• Building A Facebook Fan Page
  From Janet Fouts: Easy-to-follow step-by-step instructions for building a Facebook page. Also read part 2 with additional tips on how to “dress up” your Facebook page by adding applications, content, tagging and more.
• Killer Facebook Fan Pages: 5 Inspiring Case Studies
  From Mashable: Callan Green provides five mini case studies of brands that are doing everything right when it comes to Facebook fan pages – Pringles, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Adidas, and Red Bull.
• How To Create A Powerful And Engaging Facebook Page
  From Corporate Dollar: Advice on creating a compelling facebook page for your business from branding the page with a custom image to making use of the new features available including the tabbed interface, direct feeds for fans, multi-media integration, discussion groups and more.
• How To Develop A Facebook Page That Attracts Millions of Fans
  From AllFacebook: Suggestions for making the most of the new Facebook Pages and their updated features.
• What, Why, and How of Facebook Pages: An Expertise Roundup
  From Beth’s Blog:  Beth Kanter provides a nice roundup of expert advice from folks like from Mari Smith, Jesse Stay, Collin Douma, and others on using Facebook pages.
• 5 Elements of a Successful Facebook Fan Page
  From Mashable: Rundown on the 5 things that contribute to an effective Facebook Fan page from “networking with other platforms” to “creating a resources” to “creating contests that encourage participation.”
• How to Develop a Successful Facebook Page
  From MarketingProfs: Mark Ivey provides success strategies and highlights some of the key features of Facebook Pages.
• 8 Essential Apps for Your Brand’s Facebook Page
  From Mashable: Alison Driscoll review eight essential apps for your brand’s Facebook page – from Facebook Notes to Blog RSS Feed Reader to Twitter App and more.
• Two New Ways to Update Facebook Pages without Using Facebook
  From ReadWriteWeb: Discussion of services from hellotxt and Ping.fm that let Facebook administrators update Facebook Pages.
• 4 Reasons Why Marketers Should Choose Facebook Pages Over Facebook Groups
  From Inside Facebook: Advantages of Facebook Pages vs. Groups for marketing your business.
• 5 Tips to Revive a Fading Facebook Group
  From John Haydon: Advice on how to inject fresh life into a fading Facebook group – from “getting in touch” to “freshening up the page” to “throwing a party” and more.
• Facebook Tips: How to Use the New Business Page Layout
  From E-commerce Guide: In-depth look at recent changes made to Business Pages plus tips on how to use new features, such as status updates and Wall feeds to better connect with your Facebook fans.
• New Facebook Pages: A Guide for Social Media Marketers
  From Mashable: Curtis Hougland and Kristen Vang of Attention write- As more and more marketers use Facebook as a key conduit for brands online, it is important to note some of the new changes to their Business Pages. Following last fall’s overall redesign, these pages will now migrate to the same Wall and tabs design that personal profiles have used. You can explore the new format and follow Mashable on Facebook at Mashable’s Facebook page. Following is a rundown of what you need to know:
• The 30 Most Popular Pages on Facebook
  From Inside Facebook: Since Pages launched in late 2007, they have become the easiest way for brands to get started marketing on Facebook. Today, 3.5 million users become Fans of one of the several hundred thousand Pages on Facebook each day. Here’s the list of the 30 Most Popular Pages on Facebook.
• How To Develop A Facebook Page That Attracts Millions of Fans
  From All Facebook: Review of the the primary benefits and changes for Facebook’s new and updated branded pages.
• Now, Any Business Can Tap 53 Million Facebook Users (For Free)
  From Hubspot: Stats on Facebook along with basic how-to on creating a Facebook Business Page.
• Facebook Fan Boxes: Embeddable Facebook Pages
  From Mashable: Adam Ostrow discusses Facebook feature that allows Page administrators to embed the latest activity from their Page on their own website.
• 10 Key SEO Strategies Every Facebook Page Owner Should Know
  From Inside Facebook: Strategies for employing important SEO tactics within your Facebook Page to help your Page reach more and more Facebook fans.

Events and Causes

• YouTube – Setting up a Facebook Cause
  From My Charity Connects: This video provides an overview of the Causes application on Facebook and provides a step-by-step guide on how to create one.
• 50,000 Members In 6 Days
  From Feverbee: Advice on using Facebook for Causes (and more).
• Wild Apricot Blog : How to promote your non-profit’s cause on Facebook in five easy steps
  Wild Apricot Blog : More advice on using Facebook’s Causes application.
• Effective Fundraising with Facebook Causes
  From The Nonprofit Technology Network: Advice on getting started using Facebook causes.
• Top Ten Tips For Creating BUZZ With Facebook Events
  From Why Facebook: Facebook guru Mari Smith explores the art of using the Facebook Events feature effectively to generate buzz for your event.
• Facebook Events and The Power Behind Them
  From SocialMediaBlogster.com: Advice on using Facebook events to power up your marketing.

Tips and Advice

• Inside Facebook Blog
  Inside Facebook is an independent blog based in Palo Alto, California, focusing on Facebook and the Facebook Platform for developers and marketers. Provides agencies and marketers with information to help them understand the opportunities and risks associated with investing in both Facebook and Facebook applications. Provides reports and insight on the campaigns marketers and brands are deploying inside Facebook.
• The Facebook Marketing Bible: 24 Ways to Market Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook
  From Inside Facebook: Review of different Facebook opportunities for marketers, advisers and application developers.
• Facebook Marketing Solutions | Facebook
  Official page from Facebook run by Facebook employees intended to help brand marketers market their brands using Facebook. Includes case studies from a number of large brands using the tool, tips and how-tos, and discussion with marketers.
• Facebook Week: Facebook Resources, Analysis and Insights
  From Mashable: Collection of articles providing resources and analysis of Facebook. From building a better Facebook page to making a truly viral Facebook meme and more.
• 32 Ways to Use Facebook for Business
  From Web Worker Daily: Meryl Evans outlines 32 ways you can turn Facebook into a highly effective business tool.
• Facebook Tagging For Business | Social Media Explorer
  From Social Media Explorer: Jason Falls provides advice and 5 rules for using Facebook’s “@” tagging feature for business purposes.
• How to build a Facebook community (14 “levers” you need to be pulling)
  From John Haydon: Excellent article with tips for growing your fan base organically.
• The Anatomy of a Facebook Meme
  From Mashable: When compared to other social media sites, Facebook has a much larger potential reach for “memes” (ideas that people can’t help sharing with their friends) but is quite restrictive on the ways in which these memes can spread. To identify the characteristics necessary for a meme to thrive on Facebook, we must look at what the restrictions demand from them
• 20 Facebook Tips/Tricks You Might Not Know
  From HongKiat: Post covers some interesting things you can do on (or with) Facebook; inclusive of tricks that are not documented or unknown to many, as well as tips to stay connected better with your friends – includes tips such as sharing flickr photos to Facebook, scheduling Facebook messages, choosing what Friends show up in your Friends box, and more.
• HOW TO: Use Facebook for Professional Networking
  From Mashable: Boris Epstein provides advice on how to setup your Facebook for professional use, how to find others to network with, Facebook features that work for professional networking, and ways to maximize the value from those features.
• Facebook’s New Privacy Features: A Complete Guide
  From Mashable: Ben Parr offers an overview of Facebook’s new privacy features.
• Seven Steps to Graphing Your Facebook Strategy
  From Tech Crunch: Review of seven major aspects of Facebook you can use to increase the visibility of your startup, business, product or service: from Setting up your Profile to making connections to sharing your content.
• The Facebook Marketing Toolbox: 100 Tools and Tips to Tap the Facebook Customer Base
  From Inside CRM: long list of 100 tools and tips for leveraging Facebook as a business tool.
• Using Facebook for Marketing – 10 Company Examples
  From Dave Chaffey’s Right Touching Blog: Showcase of businesses from a range of sectors who are using the Facebook pages.
• HOW TO: Build Your Personal Brand on Facebook
  From Mashable: Personal branding expert Dan Schawabel provides a guide to building your personal brand on Facebook.
• How to Build an Impressive Social Networking Presence, Beginning with Facebook
  From Social Media Power: Advice on how to build your presence on social networking sites starting with Facebook.
• What to Do if You Forgot to Register Your Facebook Trademark URL
  From Advertising Age: Steps to take if your trademark was taken by someone before you had a chance to register it.
• 5 Tips for Optimizing Your Brand’s Facebook Presence
  From Mashable: Tips to optimize your presence on Facebook, including the right way to create profile and thumbnail graphics , how to show different content to Fans and non-Fans, creating DIY vanity urls, and how managing what and when you post can lead to greater success.
• 5 Tips for Optimizing your Facebook Marketing
  From Marketing Profs Daily Fix: Paul Dunay offers up options to consider when it comes to the tactics of marketing on Facebook – from advertising to applications to content syndication and more.
• How To Use Facebook “Notes” To Get More Traffic
  From Corporate Dollar: Advice on leveraging Facebook’s Notes application to drive web traffic to your website.
• 12 Ways to Use Facebook Professionally
  From Web Worker Daily: Discussion of how you can use Facebook to benefit your professional career from hooking up with old co-workers and current connections to setting up your profile and security settings to incorporating your other social sites like Twitter or even your own blog.
• Focus on Facebook: Interview with Kristin Foster, Digital Strategist
  From Ogilvy PR: Discussion of Facebook strategies for brands.
• Facebook for Business: Can Brands Ever Get It Right?
  From ClickZ: Anna Maria Virzi explores how brands can translate their Facebook initiatives into tangible results (e.g. sales) with some advice on getting it right – from deciding “if you branding is willing to make the investment” to developing “modules for core activities such as contests, coupons and videos/photos” to maintaining “content to keep engagement high” to “buying media to drive traffic.”
• FACEBOOK FAIL: How to Use Facebook Privacy Settings and Avoid Disaster
  From Mashable: How to use Facebook features that allow you to choose what you show and to what type of people. By using friend lists and playing with your privacy settings, you can create different views for each segment of your life.
• 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know
  From Mashable: How to use Facebook features that allow you to choose what you show and to what type of people. By using friend lists and playing with your privacy settings, you can create different views for each segment of your life.
• Finding and Engaging Your Brand Evangels on Facebook – Left The Box
  From Left The Box: A technique for easily finding people that are already publicizing your brand to their friends on Facebook.
• HOW TO: Create Branded Promotions on Facebook [500 FREE Invites]
  From Mashable: Discussion of Wildfire’s web tool and Facebook application that can help you create branded promotions on Facebook. With a few simple steps, Wildfire will help you create a comprehensive promotional campaign for your brand on Facebook, Ning, MySpace, and your website involving sweepstakes or a user contest.
• How To Remove An Application From Your Facebook Profile
  From Make Use Of: How to get rid of a Facebook application when you find you no longer have a need for it.
• Getting the Facebook Crowd to Spread Your Widgets
  From eMarketer: Interview with Liza Hausman who heads up marketing for widget platform and ad Network Gigya about how advertisers use widgets and the future of the applications on social networks such as Facebook.
• Facebook Search Tips
  Advice from Facebook’s help pages on searching for people and their content.
• Ten Facebook Tips for Power Users
  From Macworld: Here are ten tips to tweak your profile and get more out of Facebook. These tips go beyond the typical and include ways to stay better connected to your friends and look good doing it.
• The 30 Standard Facebook Profile Photo Styles
  From All Facebook: Trying to decide what type of photo to post in your Facebook profile (or any other profile for that matter). Here Nick O’Neill offers a rundown of 30 profile photos styles that you’ll find most often when exploring your Facebook friends list. If you’re looking to portray a professional image, check out Nick’s pick for Personal Branding Master- social media nonprofit expert Beth Kanter.
• How to Grow A Useful Network with the Social Media Site Facebook
  From The Baby Boomer Entrepreneur: Advice on using Facebook as a tool to grow your business network.
• To-Do List for Facebook and E-Mail Integration
  From ClickZ: Advice from Ed Henrich on how marketers can properly integrate their Facebook presence (Facebook Connect, Pages, Groups) with their email programs.
• How to Friend Mom, Dad, and the Boss on Facebook…Safely
  From Read Write Web: Oh no! Your mom just joined Facebook and what’s even worse, she wants to be your friend. More and more people are finding themselves in this situation today and unsure of what to do. Friending mom and dad, the boss, or other work colleagues opens up the details of your private life for the whole world to see – and you might not be entirely comfortable with that. What’s to be done?
• 10 Things All Businesses Should Do to Market More Effectively on Facebook
  From Inside Facebook: Here are Inside Facebook’s top 10 ways business owners can more effectively leverage Facebook to reach their target audience and drive more business.
• How to “Friend” Someone On Facebook Without Showing Your Status Updates | MakeUseOf.com
  I’m sure that this has happened to you before. Someone you have ties to, whether it’s a co-worker, your boss, or even worse, a parent, has finally discovered social networking and wants to be your newest Facebook friend. Imagine for a moment that I worked at Domino’s Pizza and that I don’t want my boss to know that I just became a fan of Papa John’s (writing this one’s gonna make me hungry). Here’s what I would do to keep that fact confined to my closer friends.
• Facebook Etiquette: Five Dos and Don’ts – PC World
  From PC World: Suggestions for managing your Facebook profile and your overall social networking persona, and warnings about places where you can get into trouble with people who matter to you personally and professionally.

Advertising on Facebook

• Facebook Ads 101 – How to Set up and Track Facebook Ads
  From Subliminal Pixel Labs: Rundown of how Facebook ads work, how to set them up and what tracking and optimization features they offer.
• How-To Guide: E-Commerce Marketing on Facebook
  From Internet.com: Leveraging Facebook business options can provide a new channel for your customers to interact, and at the same time help you acquire new customers as your Facebook fans spread the word about your business to their friends. In this Facebook how-to guide, learn how to use two of the business solutions offered by Facebook. First- the steps you need to take to create your own Facebook Business Page (also called a fan page) and then, the tasks involved in creating a Facebook Ad campaign, which can be used to send visitors to your Web site or new Facebook Business Page.

Advice for Non-Profits on Facebook

• Non-Profits on Facebook
  Facebook’s official page with advice for non-profits on using Facebook.
• Using Facebook for Your Non-Profit
  From Techsoup:  Helpful range of resources for non-profits who want to use Facebook to connect with their supporters including a beginners guide to Facebook, promoting your cause on Facebook, and more.  Also includes links to outside resources.
• Facebook’s New Public Profile Pages: Good News for Non-profits
  From Wild Apricot Blog : Facebook just got a lot more friendly for non-profits with the announcement of Public Profile Pages. This means non-profits now be able to “share all types of content with an unlimited number of users” and Facebook users will be able to comment on the posted content, just as they would on the personal profile page of any Facebook friend.
• Video Tutorial: How To Embed A Social Or Fundraising Widget Into Your Facebook Page
  From CorporateDollar.org: One of the most effective social media tools available to small non-profits are embeddable widgets. Youtube videos, fundraising widgets and social networking widgets can empower your fans to take action for your non-profit. Video tutorial on how to do this on Facebook.
• So you want a Facebook Fan Page for Your Nonprofit? Here’s the Scoop!
  From Beth Kanter: Recap of NTEN Webinar featuring Randi Zuckerberg, Director of Marketing at Facebook and Adam Conner from the DC Office on the emerging best practices for nonprofits who want to set up Facebook Fan Pages. Includes list of best practices and links to a good collection of solid how-to articles on Facebook pages.
• 4 Facebook Tips for Nonprofit Success – See What Others are Doing
  From Beth’s Blog: Guest poster Frank Barry offers up four tips to help non-profits make better use of Facebook and some great case studies

Other Facebook Tools, Applications and Features

• 30+ Apps for Doing Business on Facebook
  From Mashable: Here are over 30 Facebook applications to help promote, network, communicate, collaborate and accomplish more with your business.
• Facebook Powertools: 150+ Apps, Scripts and Add-ons for Facebook
  From Mashable: Rundown of the the leading browser extensions, desktop applications, Greasemonkey scripts and applications for Facebook – more than 150 in all.
• 20+ Great Greasemonkey Scripts for Improving Your Facebook Experience
• Facebook Connect:
  • Facebook Connect
    From Facebook Developers: Explanation of Facebook Connect which enables integration of Facebook Platform into websites. Allows website users to: Seamlessly “connect” their Facebook account and information with your website, connect and find their friends who also use your site, and share information and actions on your site with their friends on Facebook.
  • 10 Great Implementations of Facebook Connect
    From Mashable: Ben Parr reviews some implementations of Facebook Connect that stand out against the rest. Some are on this list because of the seamlessness of their integration, while others for their usefulness.  And here are even 10 more.
  • HOW TO: Add Facebook Connect to Your Blog in 8 Minutes
    From Mashable: Video tutorial for adding Facebook Connect to A Blog.
  • Six Months In: 10 of the Most Interesting Cases of Facebook Connect in Action
    From Inside Facebook: Review of 10 interesting Facebook Connect uses including CNN, Bravo.com’s Real Housewives of NYC and more.
  • Facebook and The Washington Post: More Than Meets the Eye
    From Mashable: Adam Ostrow explores the Washington Post’s implementation of Facebook Connect into it’s website including future opportunities this integration might offer.
  • Facebook Connect Comes to Digg
    Once Facebook Connect has been activated, you’re able to publish your Diggs, comments, and submissions back to your Facebook News Feed. You can also quickly invite your Facebook friends to Digg.
• Facebook Application on Delicious
  Add the Delicious application to your Facebook account and publish information about your bookmarks to your Facebook profile.
• Selective Twitter Status on Facebook
  Selective Twitter Status lets you update your Facebook status from Twitter – BUT you can choose which tweets you want – just end a tweet with #fb when you want to post it as your Facebook status – simple! * Avoid confusing your Facebook friends * Don’t swamp your profile with too many updates * Leave certain updates on Facebook for longer.
• Five Things You Can Do With This New Facebook RSS App
  From ReadWriteWeb; Review of Chia’s Facebook application that allows users to grant permission to pull theor Facebook newsfeed out of the site and publish as an RSS feed.
• Facebook Video 2.1.1
  The popular Greasemonkey Facebook video script is now a full-fledged Firefox addon that lets users download or convert Facebook videos, and embed videos outside of Facebook.
• SocialToo Vanity URLs for Facebook: Better Than the Real Thing?From Mashable: For organizations who have fewer than 1000 fans and can’t get official vanity URLs, SocialToo is offering vanity URLs that redirect to your Facebook profile (with support for pages coming soon). A bonus too: analytics are offered.

Statistics About Facebook

• Statistics
  Official statistics from Facebook
• Facebook Pages Statistics
  Statistics on Facebook Pages
• Facebook Marketing Statistics, Demographics, Reports, and News – CheckFacebook
  CheckFacebook.com is not affiliated with Facebook. Each day, CheckFacebook.com tracks data reported from Facebook’s advertising tool to help marketers and researchers understand how Facebook is spreading across the globe.
• Why Facebook is growing wrinkles
  From Telegraph: Older users are jumping on the social networking bandwagon as if their lives depended on it – and in some cases, they do.
• Women Over Age 55 Fastest-Growing Group On Facebook
  From MediaPost: Results from survey showing that women age 55 and over are the fastest-growing U.S. demographic group on Facebook. The number of women on Facebook is growing faster than men in almost every age group, and women now make up 56.2% of users (as of 2/09).
• Facebook Users Are Getting Older. Much Older.
  From Mashsable: Analytics company iStrategyLabs has examined the demographics stats from Facebook’s Social Ads platform, and they’ve reached some very interesting conclusions. Facebook usersbase, as a whole, is getting much older very fast.

As a market researcher, I’ve conducted my share of focus groups and in-depth interviews.  As a result, I’ve learned what consumers had to say when I was guiding the conversation — with clients eagerly awaiting the next mention of their brand.  Sure, people talk about what I wanted them to talk about – but that’s what they were paid to do.

So, I’m always excited to find other ways to get into consumer’s heads. Through Robin, I’m hooked on social bookmarking – and Delicious in particular. And a number of great articles included in Robin’s Ultimate Guide to Delicious Social Bookmarking like Steve Rubel’s article 15 Things I Learned from Delicious, Jeremiah Owyang’s Using Delicious for Marketing Research and Ann Smarty’s How to Analyze your Site with Del.icio.us all pointed to how Delicious could be used for market research. Most importantly, Lisa Braziel’s  Introducing Delicious Tag Mining for Brand Research: provided a terrific example of how, with analytic imagination, Delicious could inform brand research.

Why Focus On Delicious?

With Delicious, you get to see how users categorize different chunks of content. And, users don’t have social pressures in Delicious: it’s not organized by clubs or affinity groups (like Facebook) even though users can share their content and comments. As a researcher, I can’t stress enough the value of individual choices! I decided to “mine” Delicious to see if I could find some broader trends. Since I love shopping, I wanted to generate a few fresh hypotheses about what consumers were thinking about shopping – especially in this economic downturn.

Using Delicious can be confusing and I had to do some trial and error. I first played around with the “explore tags” function, and found that both the “recent” and “popular” lists don’t work well for research-they are updated constantly and so, obviously, unstable. So, I ended up (at Robin’s suggestion) using Delicious search. This gave me a stable list of websites that was ranked by the frequency of tags of the search term (not just total bookmarks.)

Here’s My 6-Step Approach

• Step 1: Keyword Search: I started with one search term (shopping) through Delicious search- searching for Everybody’s bookmarks.

• Step 2: Share with Colleagues: I stored this search as a bookmark to share with other researchers. (To share it with Robin, I tagged it with “for:iig”)
• Step 3:  Determine # Tags for Top Ranked Sites: I then identified how many shopping tags there were for each of the top ranked sites from the default search ranking. By clicking on the total number of bookmarks for each site, I found all the tags and marked down the number of shopping tags.

• Step 4:  Establish Threshold and Narrow Down Sites: I then set a threshold for the number of shopping tags to include in my exercise. For my preliminary shopping exercise, which had a large number of bookmarks, I set a threshold of 5,000 user tags. This gave me 7 sites.
• Step 5: Determine Other Popular Tags for Each Top Site: Using this list, I noted the 10 most popular tags on these sites, apart from the search term (shopping). I could also do this by searching the URL on Delicious. Now, I had a list of tags and from these, I could begin to look for patterns [from either the repeat mentions or relationships between tags) and generate hypotheses.
• Step 6: Visit Each Site: Finally, since I'm an avid online shopper, the fun part. I visited each site to look at what products it was selling and what its features and content were. Especially if you're not familiar with your category, this is a must.

What Did I find?

Table 1 below shows what this first level of Delicious mining yields, with a list of tag terms used. The 7 sites are: Etsy, RetailMeNot, Amazon, Woot, ThinkGeek, Ebay, and Threadless. Eyeballing this list, I found some terms that I expected to see: deals, bargains, coupons, discount. In my mind, these were boring, since it's not news that online shopping has always invited bargain-hunters, and anyone like me who's an avid online shopper is happily aware of all the sales.

But, I was looking for some fresh ideas about shopping - something I couldn't get from metrics data or Google Search. And I was not disappointed. As Table 1 shows, my tag list also gave me some less expected terms: "handmade", "community" "art" - even "cool" and "fun" and "inspiration." Given all the bad news about super-thrifty shoppers, I was relieved to find that at least some folks are having fun, buying clothing, gifts, gadgets and toys.

So, here's my first level take on this tag list:

1. Shopping online, from this list of tags, looks like an entertaining and highly social experience.  Sure, times are bad, but shoppers are still out there enjoying themselves.  Even a bargain-oriented gadget site like Woot (which sells only one item per day until it is sold out) has its own blog, its own version of community, and contests.   And Thinkgeek offers "stuff for smart masses" - with such must-haves as a fish-training school, it's no surprise why Delicious users tagged that this site as "cool" "humor" and "fun."  I even found a techie Haiku section here.
2. There's a segment of alternative shoppers -- and what they want isn't made in China. Small businesses and crafts persons are producing unusual hand-crafted items that have a market for those seeking "inspiration", "design", and "art." Etsy is a crafts site that sells hand-crafted items (some, like handmade puppets, are pricey), and features a section where buyers can request customized item bids, like "tablecloths for my daughters wedding." Threadless offers hand-designed t-shirts with a community based on contests and ratings of t-shirts-and even videos of t-shirt designers. Definitely not made in China.  I wonder -as luxury takes a hit, if the "make it for me" segment is the next new opportunity.
3. While jobs may be hard to find, some Americans may be thinking about creating their own online business.  Three of the sites on our list are buyer-seller communities: Etsy "Your place to buy and sell all things handmade" has an active user community and Threadless, a hybrid site, and E-bay.  I'm guessing users are bookmarking these as they think about starting or expanding their own ventures in the crafts/handmade space.  At the same time E-bay looks it's becoming a straight business auction site - it's only tagged with community by a small number (93) users.  While this may not pull eBay traffic down, it may spell bad news for the merchant side.

Where to go next?

In exercises like this, it's up to the researcher (in this case, me) where to go next.  I personally was intrigued by the niche buyer seller communities.  So, I next searched (again, using Delicious search) for "community shopping" in order to explore this theme further. [Hint: check each site individually to make sure results are relevant.] Since this search yields a much smaller number of sites, I chose a lower threshold level for community tags (N=500).

Where did this take me?

I again spotted tags of ‘design”, “gifts” “fashion” – but, I now saw “environment” “green” and “sustainability” as well as “social, ” which is shared by two shopping blogs (thisnext.com and stylehive.com.) “Freecycle.org” is a site which is “a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It’s all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills.” Reading the user notes on Delicious, I read it is part of a “global gifting movement” which might explain the brand-new t-shirts it sells in its store.   Checking the Etsy site, I found it too promotes a movement – a “handmade movement” – even a slogan suggesting that buying handmade is connected to changing the world. Global gifting movement?  Handmade movement?  From my earlier list, I’d hypothesize that alternative shoppers and communities might thrive during the downturn.

Now, some new thoughts:

1. The new entrepreneurs selling handmade, independently designed or recycled items perceive themselves as part of a social movement-and buyers may feel the same way. I know retailers have already begun to make donations to encourage shopping – but I now wonder if shopping, even without the promise of donating, will become itself a sort of cause. Perhaps, my next necklace purchase will support the handmade movement?   (Now, that’s a cause I can support.)
2. At the same time, American-style consumerism is alive and well.  I was thrilled to find social shopaholics in the other sites on the list. Both (tagged with “social” and “design”) depend on the idea that people like to “rave” about products.  Thisnext proclaims that “better buying leads to better living” and Stylehive, a social bookmarking site, is “an online style club for people who live for fashion, design and shopping.”  Seems like an enthusiastic mantra of consumerism.  But not exactly– I checked on the “maven” buyers on Thisnext, and found a recommendation for “100% Organic Bamboo towels” and another “maven” with a “green” list.

So, what can be gained by using Delicious for consumer insights?

Bottom line: for market researchers who are interested in new product development and “idea generation”, Delicious is a true gold mine. Like any other research technique, Delicious mining will need to be refined -and I’ll be working on enhancing what I’ve done here in the coming months.  I’m really looking forward to seeing what other researchers come up with as well. Have ideas, questions or thoughts about using Delicious to mine for consumer insights?  Feel free leave comments here.

My favorite social media tool is social bookmarking service Delicious.  I’ve always been an avid researcher and Delicious allows me to discover, save, organize and share information that I find online like no other service.  It’s the engine of many of the blog posts I put together.

Delicious is an especially good tool for marketers. Not only are is it an excellent tool for research and data mining, but it can also be a great vehicle for driving website traffic- articles that make it to the popular page(s) of Delicious can deliver large amounts of traffic to a website.

The bookmarking feature of Delicious when compared to social news sites such as Digg and Stumbleupon can also lead to a steadier flow of traffic and repeat traffic over time as people return to pages they have bookmarked on Delicious.

In this post, I’ve pulled together a very comprehensive collection of tutorials, advice, resources, tips and tools to help you use Delicious to enhance your marketing, research and other business objectives.  There’s a special section just for marketers.

You can visit my Delicious account and join my network on Delicious to tap into my social bookmarking activity. If you like this post, be sure to bookmark it on Delicious!

Basic Tutorials and Introductions

For a very basic introduction to social bookmarking, visit our post: Essential Social Media Tools: Social News & Bookmarking.

• Six Reasons to Use Del.icio.us
  From PR Perspective: Quick rundown on the benefits of using Delicious.
• What is Del.icio.us?
  From Clickable Culture: Quick Primer explaining what Delicious is and how it works.
• » Us.ef.ull: Beginners Guide to Delicious
  From Beelerspace: Introductory Guide with simple steps to follow.
• How to Use Del.icio.us
  From Ogilvy Public Relations: Overview that provides basic instructions for using Delicious
• Simply Del.icio.us Online Social Bookmarking, or: Tagging for Teaching
  From David Muir: Comprehensive tutorial on using Delicious.
• Teacher Tube Videos
  • Using Del.icio.us
  • Creating a Del.icio.us Account
  • Using del.icio.us (same title but different from above video)

Key Site Features and Anatomy

• Importing Your Browser Bookmarks into Delicious
  If you have bookmarks stored in your browser, you can use this tool to transfer a copy of them into Delicious. Then, you’ll be able to access those bookmarks from any computer connected to the internet and share them with your friends and other people.
• Saving Bookmarks with Bookmarklets on Delicious
  A quick tool for putting a button on your browser’s Toolbar, bookmarklets offer an easy way to post and view your bookmarks on Delicious. Available for Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Chrome and Opera.  There are also more extensive browser Add-ons – the Internet Explorer Add-On and the Firefox Add-On that can be downloaded to enable quick and easy bookmarking.
• Searching on Delicious
  Official help section on Delicious with overview of how to search for information on the site including advanced search options and the ability to search your network’s bookmarks.
• Finding Popular Bookmarks on Delicious
  Real time rundown of the most popular bookmarks on Delicious. You can also search for the most popular bookmarks by tags listed in the right column of this page.
• Using Delicious Tags to Organize and Find Information
  Tags are one-word descriptors that you can assign to your bookmarks on Delicious to help you organize and remember them. This help page provides a simple overview of the tagging feature and explains how to add tags, view tags, bundle tags and more.
• Using the Delicious Network, Subscriptions and In-Box Functions
  Delicious help section that explains how to use the Network and subscriptions function in Delicious. What’s your network, how to add and remove people to your network., what are subscriptions and more.
• Delicious RSS Feeds
  For most pages within Delicious, there are associated RSS feeds for bookmarks that you can use in news readers, blogs, or your own third-party applications. This is a powerful feature that allows you to get RSS feeds for specific tags, specific users, and specific tags from specific users.
• Looking up URLs on Delicious
  Lets you type in a url and see what people have saved from that URL
• Creative Commons on Delicious
  Put a Creative Commons or public domain license on your bookmark’s RSS feeds.
• Delicious to go
  Information about mobile version of Delicious.
• Delicious Blog – Get Tips and Resources
  Official blog of Delicious with tips and resources to enhance your usage of the service. You can sign up for the RSS feed.

Specifically for Marketers

• Keys to Developing Bookmarkable Content
  From Traffikd: Advice on creating content that will be bookmarked, particularly on Delicious.
• Tagging: Keeping Tabs On The Net
  From Business Week: A little old but still a useful (and brief) article on how some businesses have used Delicious and it’s tagging feature to their advantage.
• Introducing Delicious Tag Mining for Brand Research:
  From Ignite Social Media: A nice example of how to use delicious tags to conduct brand research.
• 3 Tips for Marketing More Effectively With Del.icio.us | Traffikd
  From Taffickd: For marketer using Delicious for traffic, inbound links and exposure, here are 3 specific tips for increasing the effectiveness of your efforts.
• Marketers Guide to Del.icio.us
  From Traffikd: Advice on using Delicious for traffic, links, and exposure.
• How to Get Targeted Traffic Using Delicious
  From Mark Flavin’s Internet Marketing Blog: 2 part video series that will show you how to set up a Del.Icio.Us account & how to use Del.Icio.Us to drive targeted traffic to your website or blog. Enjoy!
• 10 Tips for Making Your Blog Posts More del.icio.us
  From Vandelay Website Design: Steps to take to encourage users to save and share your articles on the social bookmarking site Delicious in order to drive website traffic – including how you craft the content itself.
• Four Effective Ways to Get Listed on the del.icio.us Popular Pages
  From DoshDosh: The aim of this article is to examine how you can get your content listed as popular items in del.icio.us, which will ultimately send a massive amount of visitors to your blog.
• Purpose-Built del.icio.us Pages Explained
  From Social Media Power: How you can use purpose-built delicious pages to enhance your online business goals.
• Using del.icio.us for Thought Leadership
  From PR Squared: Advice on using Delicious for marketing and PR purposes. Includes the idea of “purpose-built” delicious pages which can be leveraged for content on your blog.
• Using Delicious for Marketing Research
  From Web Strategy by Jeremiah: Advice on using Delicious for market research such as finding out how people think about things and helping to develop search marketing strategies.
• How to Analyze your Site with Del.icio.us
  From Ann Smarty: Social bookmarking is not only a nice way to get more traffic and links. It’s also an effective method to explore what people think about your site by tracking your content popularity.
• How To Track When Delicious Users Bookmark Your Site
  From Webmonkey: Instructions for keeping track of how many Delicious users bookmark your site and what type of tags they use.
• Del.icio.us: An Underrated Link Building Tool
  From Vandelay Design Blog: Discussion of why and how Delicious can be a powerful tool for driving traffic and building links to your website or blog.

Advice and Tips

• The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users
  From Slacker Manager: Helpful advice for making the most of Delicious.
• How To Use Del.icio.us To Take Over the World
  From Mike Stopforth: Good article on how to use the people or networking component of Delicious to get the most out of the service.
• Practical 101s: Social Bookmarking With Delicious
  From davefleet.com: Great introduction and advice on using the Delicious social bookmarking site. Also from Dave, read 6 Ways To Make Life Easier With Del.icio.us.
• Become a Del.icio.us Power User
  From Web Worker Daily: Very tips to make the most of the social bookmarking application.
• Using Tags Effectively in Del.icio.us
  From Technorants: Guidelines on how to use the Delicious tagging feature most effectively.
• Delicious Search Tips From Lifehack: The power of del.icio.us comes in the form of it’s social component. Via the Delicious community, you can find some of the best resources on the Internet minus the junk. It also gives you a way to save and organize the information you find. Many people aren’t aware of the service’s full range of features and valuable add-ons. This article reviews 10 ways that you can use del.icio.us to its full potential
• How to be More Productive and Organize Your Delicious Bookmarks
  From The Blog Herald: Five easy steps to getting yourself organized online from Organizing your Delicious bookmarks to unsubscribing from unnecessary emails.
• 15 Things I Learned from Delicious
  From Micro Persuasion: Steve Rubel shares some nifty tips for data mining on Delicous including a nifty bookmarklet that lets you see the bookmarks for the url of any page you’re viewing in your browser.
• Be Careful What You Save – Delicious Tips
  From Dave Fleet: Advice on sharing (and not sharing) when saving articles to Delicious.
• Delicious Hack: How to send messages via Delicious
  From Marketallica: Innovative method for using Delicious to send messages to people you want to connect to.
• 10 Interesting People You Should Have In Your Delicious Network
  From MMMeega: As it states, a list of interesting people to add to your Delicious network.
• Networking with Del.icio.us
  Nice screencast from educator Liz Davis that demonstrates the power of connecting with other people through the Delicious networking function. Useful even for even non-educators.
• Tagging Strategies For Successful Social Bookmarking
  From Social Media Explorer: Tips on how to use tagging more effectively with social bookmarking service Delicious.
• 8 Tips for Better del.icio.us Bookmarking
  From Web Worker Daily: Advice to help you be a better bookmarker with del.icio.us.
• Tag your way to del.icio.us domination | Social Signal
• How to Use del.icio.us Like a Pro
  From Mahalo.com: Comprehensive guide to using social bookmarking site Delicious.
• What are Purpose-Built del.icio.us Pages, and How are They Used?
  From Social Media Power: Introduces the concept of purpose-built Delicious page and talks about how you can integrate them into your social media content and marketing strategies.
• How to Get More Bookmarks and Better Links
  From Chris Garrett: Excellent advice on getting more people to bookmark your articles.

Tools

• Official Delicious Tools
  • Delicious Bookmarking, Badges and other Tools
    Bookmarking buttons and add-ons for your browser or website- Browser buttons for saving bookmarks, tools to add your bookmarks and tags to your website or blog, Delicious badges for your blog or website.
  • Facebook Application on Delicious
    Add the Delicious application to your Facebook account and publish information about your bookmarks to your Facebook profile.
  • Tagometer on Delicious
    With our JSON powered Tagometer Badge, you can add some flair to your site. With this badge, it’s easy to show both tags and number of saves, so it’s easy to show visitors how interesting you are.
  • Tagrolls on Delicious
    Tagrolls are a way for you to display your Delicious tags as part of your website. First play with the settings below then simply insert this HTML code into the hypertext of your page:
  • Network Badges on Delicious
    Network Badges allow you to display details about your Delicious network as part of your website. First play with the settings. Then simply insert the HTML code you’re given into the hypertext of your page.
  • Linkrolls on Delicious
    Linkrolls are a way for you to have your latest Delicious bookmarks displayed as part of your website. First play with the settings below then simply insert this HTML code into the hypertext of your page:
• Absolutely Delicious Tools Collection From Quick Online Tips: Regularly updated list of the best Delicious tools and services on the web (includes 3rd party tools beyond the official tools that Delicious offers).
• Third Party Tools on Delicious
  List of third party tools for Delicious provided by Delicious itself.
• Delicious Toolbox: 80+ Updated Tools and Resources
  From Mashable: Here are over 80 tools for everything from your mobile device to your blog, and more, that can help you view your bookmarks in new and unique ways, backup your bookmarks in a secure location, take your bookmarks with you on the go, blog about your most recent saves, and then some.
• How to Organize Your Web With Delicious – The Essential Toolbox
  From Makeuseof.com: Discussion of a set of tools that can help you be more productive by making the most of Delicious bookmarks.
• Five Great Delicious Hacks, in Five Minutes, for Delicious’s 5th Birthday – ReadWriteWeb
  How-to video reviewing five of ways to use the Firefox plug-in Greasemonkey and associated userscripts to radically change your Delicious experience. With just a handful of clicks you can integrate Delicious into sites like Google Reader and Digg, you can sort and view Delicious in brand new ways, and make a number of other changes.  For more on the Greasemonkey extention and users scripts see: How to Start Using Greasemonkey in Under 5 Minutes from ReadWriteWeb.
• 15 Useful Greasemonkey Scripts for Del.icio.us Users
  From Killer Techtips: This is a list of about 15 Greasemonkey scripts for Del.icio.us. Some of these add functional enhancements. Others add interface enhancements and some others integrate other services like Ma.gnolia with Del.icio.us. Requires the Firefox browser and the Greasemonkey extension.
• Specific 3rd Party Tools of Note:
  • Popacular – popular delicious bookmarks
    A list of the most popular bookmarks from delicious.com
  • Tweecious Converts Twitter Links to Delicious Bookmarks
    From ReadWriteWeb: Review of Tweecious, a new Firefox plugin that automates the conversion of Twitter links to Delicious bookmarks.
  • del.icio.us tag cleaner
    This is a tool for removing unnecessary tags from your del.icio.us bookmarks.
  • delizzy – del.icio.us Bookmarks Search Engine
    Del.icio.us is a great service, but when you search through your bookmarks, you are only searching through tags, titles and descriptions, not the page content. del.izzy lets you search through all content, including title, description and page content, for all your bookmarks.
  • del.icio.us tag search
    A form allows you to look up del.icio.us links that are tagged with one or more subjects.
  • Fresh Delicious
    Free downloadable tool checks your delicious bookmarks for broken and outdated links
  • Wordpress Plugin for Delicious Posting
    Wordpress Plugin that allows you to post your Delicious bookmarks to your blog with customization features.
  • deliGoo – Delicious Search Engine
    deliGoo is an extension for Firefox (2.0+) and Internet Explorer (6.0+), which is built into your browser in the form of an additional button on the tools’ panel. deliGoo searches on the sites, indicated in your del.icio.us bookmarks. With its help you can find the necessary page according to any phrase or word, which it contains. And one more thing – deliGoo can create on your demand custom search engines on any del.icio.us tag.
  • similicio.us – find similar sites
    Type in a url for a website or article that you like and this site will find other websites you might like based on people’s tags/bookmarks on del.icio.us.
  • Bookmark suggestions from inSuggest
    Enter a Delicious user name and get recommendations for simliar bookmarks.

Steve’s e-booklet is a perfect document to share with colleagues who are just getting started and need to understand what LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other social networking services are all about.

Steve’s been a great promoter of my blog posts on his own blog and I’m happy to have an opportunity to return the favor.  Here’s the link:  Build Your Own Opportunity Network: Getting Started in Social Media.

Have some questions about how to set up your LinkedIn profile for maximum impact?

Wondering what you should avoid doing on LinkedIn?

I’ve been using LinkedIn for years and have found it to be one of the most useful professional networking sites online.   It can help you build your professional network, establish your brand/image, and market your services.  I’ve even found LinkedIn’s group feature to be a helpful tool for driving traffic to this blog.

I’ve covered LinkedIn a bit in some of my recent posts – “How-To: Build & Manage Your Brand Identity with Social Media” and “Ultimate How-To: Grow Your Social Media Network.”  Here I provide a comprehensive guide to a range of tutorials/how-to’s, tips, advice and tools to help you become a LinkedIn power user.

Want to connect with me via LinkedIn? Feel free to send me an invitation on LinkedIn explaining why you’d like to connect with me on LinkedIn.

Tutorials and How-To’s

• LinkedIn Learning Center
  Official Linked In Site with information on learning the basics, information on site features (e.g. profile, answers, mobile) and a link to a New User guide.
• LinkedIn How-Tos
  From Linked Intelligence: Practical collection of How-To’s from Dave Taylor including figuring our your Linked In profile URL, how to make your Linked in profile public, deleting contacts in Linked in and more.
• The Social Media Starter Kit: LinkedIn
  From Altitude Branding: Beginners Guide to Linked In by Amber Naslund.
• Video: What is Linked In? from CNN.com
  CNN’s Sasha Herriman gets a refresher course on LinkedIn, an online social networking site aimed at professional
• How to Use LinkedIn
  From BNET: Excellent how-to/tutorial from Jake Swearingen on creating a good profile, building your network, getting the most from your connections, and managing your network. Includes good checklists and don’ts as well.

Tips and Advice

• The Official LinkedIn Blog Official Linked In Blog with advice and tips.
• 10 Part Series: Can LinkedIn Work for You?
  From Linked Intuition: Advice on using LinkedIn in 10 parts – includes enhancing your networking, establishing credibility, connecting your offline brand to your online brand and more.
• Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn
  From How To Change the World: Guy Kawasaki offers up solid tips on the top 10 ways to increase the value of LinkedIn including advice on increasing your visibility, improving your connectability, improving you Google PageRank and more.   Also see Guy’s post:  LinkedIn Profile Extreme Makeover.
• LinkedWorking: Generating Success on LinkedIn the Worlds Largest Professional Networking Website
  In this book, Frank Agin and Lewis Howes show you how you can leverage LinkedIn and position yourself to capitalize on opportunities.
• 10 Tips to Use LinkedIn Like a Professional
  From AriWriter: Ari Herzog provides solid advice on using LinkedIn in a more effective manner for professional networking – from “keeping your profile updated” to “writing in first person instead of third” to “actively asking and answering questions” and more.
• How To Get More From LinkedIn
  From Sitepoint: Article outlines a few of the ways to get more from your LinkedIn account- from optimizing your profile to finding groups to join to using the Linked in Answers feature to searching more effectively on Linked In.
• Top 10 mistakes people make on LinkedIn From Grow My Law Firm: List of things you want to avoid doing on Linked In.  Also read 7 more things to avoid on LinkedIn with 7 more things not to do.
• 5 LinkedIn tips on effective personal branding
  From the Official LinkedIn Blog: Personal branding guru Dan Schawbel offers up five tips on using a professional networking site like LinkedIn to build your personal and professional brand on the web.
• 33 Ways to Use LinkedIn for Business
  From Work Worker Daily: Post from Meryl Evans offers advice on how to use LinkedIn for business.
• Five LinkedIn Tips
  From Stepcase Lifehack: Advice on enhancing your use of Linked In – tips like adding your email address to your last name, filling out your profile completely, getting recommendations from colleagues and more.
• HOW TO: Build Your Company’s Profile on LinkedIn
  From Mashable: Advice from Adam Ostrow on building a profile for your business on LinkedIn.
• How to Be a LinkedIn Superstar
  From iMediaConnection.com: Tips on how to best utilize LinkedIn for you and your business.
• 100+ Smart Ways to Use LinkedIn
  From Linked Intelligence: Broad collection of advice on using Linkedin as a business tool – with links to articles on a wide range of specific topics in usage categories such as Business Development/Marketing/Sales, Career Management/Personal Branding/Resumes, Job Search, Recruiting, Growing your Network, Keeping in Touch, meeting Face to Face, Organizing and Extending Groups and more.
• Get Ahead on LinkedIn
  From Wired’s How-To Wiki: Primer on using Linked in from “planning your profile” to “working your network” and more.
• How to Get the Most Out of LinkedIn
  From Mashable: Brian Wallace provides advice and tips on how to leverage LinkedIn.
• Advice on Using Linked in Groups
  • 5 ways to get more from your LinkedIn Groups
    From the Official LinkedIn Blog: Here are 5 ways to get the most out of your group memberships on LinkedIn.
  • LinkedIn Groups Add Marketing Power
    From Mashable: Adam Ostrow gives a rundown on a number of features that give group admins of LinkedIn groups more marketing muscle – from the ability to send announcements via email to group members to the ability to import RSS feeds into the News area of groups.
  • 5 Tips for Creating, Promoting and Managing a LinkedIn Group
    From Hubspot: Solid advice and tips for leveraging the power of LinkedIn groups – from creating a group to promoting a group to managing a group.
• Advice on Linked In Profile and Profile Elementss:
  • Make Your LinkedIn Profile Work for You
    From chrisbrogan.com: Advice on writing a solid LinkedIn Profile.
  • Are You Missing An Opportunity With Your LinkedIn Tag Line?
    From I’m On LinkedIn – Now What???: Jason Alba offers up advice on how to use your LinkedIn tagline to your advantage.
  • Write Your LinkedIn Profile for Your Future
    From Chris Brogan: More great advice from Chris on creating your LinkedIn profile with a focus on demonstrating not only where you are now but also where you plan to go next.
  • Elements of a Good LinkedIn Recommendation
    From Chris Brogan: Smart advice from Chris on how to write good LinkedIn recommendation for others as well as how to ask others to write LinkedIn recommendation for you.
  • What recruiters look for in a LinkedIn profile: 8 tips
    From the Official LinkedIn Blog: Advice from Executive recruiter Matt Schwartz on some key characteristics of a LinkedIn user that grab his attention.
• Top 3 Ways to Add LinkedIn Connections and Why You Should Care
  From Peopletoucher: Advice on why it is imperative to add connections and grow your network to add to your searching ability on LInked In – and how to go about doing this.
• Optimizing your LinkedIn Search Experience
  From the Official LinkedIn Blog: Advice on designing an improved user experience for Search.
• LinkedIn help
  Official blog behind the book:”I’m on Linked In, Now What?” with advice on getting the most out of LinkedIn for professionals and for your career.
• Advice for small businesses:
  • Using LinkedIn as a Small Business Owner
    From Social Media Today: Advice for small business owners on how to use Linked In to enhance their business success.
  • 7 Ways Linkedin.com will Improve Your Small Business
    From Inovedia Marketing: Advice on leveraging LinkedIn for small businesses.

Tools

• LinkedIn: LinkedIn Tools
  Official LinkedIn Tools that allow you so search, build your network and manage your contacts from the applications you may already be using – includes Outlook Toolbar, Browser Toolbar, Email Signature tool, a Google Toolbar Assistant, and more.
• Linked In Tools
  From Linked Intuition: List of LinkedIn tools such as the LinkedIn Presence Scoring Tool along with LinkedIn browser toolbars, widgets and more.
• LINKEDIN TOOLBOX: Top 10 LinkedIn Tools
  From Mashable: Review of tools, scripts, and plugins to manage Linked In and make it better and easier to use.
• Alltop – Top LinkedIn News
  Alltop’s collection of headlines covering the latest stories from the best sites and blogs that cover LinkedIn.
• LinkedInABox: Unleash Your LinkedIn Profile
  LinkedInABox™ is a simple widget that can be embedded on any web page and provides a summary of your personal profile, as presented in your LinkedIn account.
• TopLinked People on LinkedIn
  Listing of the top (by numbers of connections) LinkedIn networkers and their number of connections.

Trying to figure out the best way to brand yourself or establish your company’s brand identity on social media sites?

Deciding whether to set up separate Twitter accounts – a personal account and a company account?

Looking for tools to manage multiple social media profiles and identities more effectively?

There are a host of important considerations, challenges and opportunities in building either your own or your company’s online presence and brand identity via social media.  In this post we’ve gathered wide range of resources, advice and tools to help you build and manage your social media brand identity more effectively.

Have any more tips?  Leave them in the comments section below.

Building Your Social Brand

• How to Start (or Start-over) Building Your Personal Brand
  From Skelliewag: This post shows you how to go about building a personal brand and discusses the value of your personal brand and why you might want to create one in the first place.
• Building a Popular Social Media Profile: Seven Essential Characteristics
  From Dosh Dosh: Examines some of the qualities which contribute to the growth and eventual popularity of a social media profile – for your brand or for you as a end user.
• Branding Strategies for Your Social Media Profiles on the Web
  From SEOmoz: The profile name, the image you use as an icon or avatar, the webpage you link to and the words you use to describe yourself have a significant impact in how you’re perceived and how you’re remembered across the web. Some advice on doing these things in the most effective manner with a focus on how this effects search optimization.
• How To Create Compelling Social Media Profiles
  From Search Engine Land: How to create compelling social media profiles online and help build your brand and business.
• 3 Powerful Strategies to Make your Social Media Profile Dynamic and Uncluttered
  From Catch The Posts: Helpful strategies to make your social media profile clean and dynamic.
• Claim Your Brand Name on Social Networks or Suffer
  From Personal Branding Blog:  Personal branding expert Dan Schawbel provides advice on how to protect and secure your name on social media sites so it is not used by someone else.
• Personal Branding 101: How to Discover and Create Your Brand
  From Mashable: Personal branding expert Dan Schawbel shares his personal branding process to help you think through what face you want to show to the world and how you want to position yourself for success.
• Develop a Strong Personal Brand Online- Part 1
  From Chris Brogan:  In this post, Chris reviews some branding basics.  In Part 2, Chris reviews the technology of building a personal brand.  Also see Elements of a Personal Brand – an excellent article where Chris lays out elements of a personal branding from “being yourself” (something Chris is a master at) to “being responsible” to “joining the conversation…from the heart.”  Chris also has a long list of 100 Personal Branding Tactics.
• Social Media for Business: The Dos & Don’ts of Sharing
  From Mashable: It doesn’t matter if you’re on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr; your online personality is not only part of your overall brand, it becomes an interactive experience for you and your business. So, who is the face or voice of your brand and what do they share? It’s a very important decision in and of itself. Just as you create branding guidelines and key messaging guides, so too should you dedicate time to creating your social media personality.
• Advertising Yourself: Building a Personal Brand through Social Networks
  From Knowledge@Wharton: Discussion of how social networks can be used to reshape your career by building a personal brand.
• 10 Reasons To Use Your Real Name As Your Twitter @Name
  From TwiTip: Scott Williams provides a solid rationale for using your real name no matter whether your Twitter account is a business account, personal account or brand account.
• Personal Brand – How to Build Yours In Twitter
  From Twitip: Helpful tips for getting your message noticed and building your name on Twitter.
• 6 Reasons To Get Rid Of That Generic Twitter Background Once and for All
  From Twitip: Nice post from Fredrickus Williford with the rationale for replacing your generic Twitter background with a custom background.  For more on creating a custom Twitter Background – see our post: How to Create a Unique Twitter Background.
• 5 Ways to Take Control of Your Personal Brand Today
  From Mashable: Personal branding expert Dan Schawbel provides 5 ways you can control your online identity, protect your future, centralize your digital assets, and safeguard your brand from threats. From “claiming your Google profile” to “reserving your name on social networks” to “establishing a personal hub” to “having a reputation management strategy” to “promoting your expertise.”
• Here’s some more fundamental advice from Personal Branding expert Dan Schawbel on how to build your personal brand with specific social media tools- blogs, Facebook and Twitter:
  • 10 Step Beginners’ Guide to Blogging Your Personal Brand
    From Dan Schawbel’s Personal Branding Blog: First post in a series about blogging your personal brand.  Also see his Intermediate Guide, Advanced Guide, and Expert Guide.
  • HOW TO: Build Your Personal Brand on Facebook
    From Mashable: In this post, Personal branding expert Dan Schawabel focuses on how to build your personal brand on Facebook.
  • 30-Minute Brand Building for Twitter | Personal Branding Blog – Dan Schawbel
    From Personal Branding Blog: Here’s a 5-step guide from personal branding expert Dan Schawbel that walks you through exactly what you need to do – spending 30 minutes or less per day branding yourself on Twitter.

Managing Social Identity and Reputation

• Managing Your Reputation Online
  From CIO.com: The results that appear when recruiters and hiring managers search for your name online may determine whether or not you get called in for an interview. To improve your profile online and increase your career opportunities, take advantage of blogs and social networking tools
• Manage your Online Identity
  From ClaimID: Best practices for managing your online identity using a multi-faceted approach -  finding yourself online and automatically tracking your identity.
• Manage Your Online Reputation
  From Lifehacker: How to leverage social media profiles to influence the results people get when they search for your name online.
• How To Manage Your Online Reputation
  From ReadWriteWeb: Review of ways you can use the web and various applications to stay on top of your online reputation or track any keyword of your choosing without having to shell out a large, monthly fee.
• HOW TO: Manage Multiple Social Media Profiles
  From Mashable: Ben Parr offers up 5 steps that make the task of maintaining multiple profiles less tedious, freeing up time to better connect with other people.
• How to Remove False Libelous Info About Yourself Online
  From MakeUseOf.com: What you can do when someone writes something libelous about you online.
• HOW TO: Take Control of Your Google Search Results
  From Mashable: Personal branding expert Dan Schawbel provides terrific strategies for controlling your personal Google search results to ensure a more favorable impression of your personal brand.
• A Guide to Protecting Your Online Identity
  From Mashable: Advice, tools and tips for managing and protecting your online brand identity.

Corporate Social Identities/Brands

• Why should brands own their social media profiles?
  From Econsultancy: Explores reasons why brands need to take ownership of their social media profiles.
• Establishing Corporate Identity in Social Media
  From Peachpit: Joel Postman discusses social media implications to the corporate brand, including the definition of brand, and whether a company can control its brand, manage it, share it, or must give it over to the whims of consumers.
• Finding the Right “Brand Voice” on Twitter
  From Mashable: When businesses open an account on Twitter, they must consider the right “Brand Voice.” One that is appropriate for what they want to say, and who they want to reach. This is a different sort of voice than the one companies have been familiar with in their traditional print and broadcast media channels, as it’s a more open and authentic form of communication. While there is no established roadmap for launching a brand on Twitter, here are some observations about some approaches to follow and pitfalls to avoid.
• Using Twitter for Brands or Corporate Identities
  From Fast Wonder Blog: Best practices for using a corporate Twitter account effectively without being spammy.
• 10 Steps For Mastering Your Social Domain
  From Media Post: David Berkowitz provides useful recommendation of steps brands should take to take charge of their social identities online.
• Your Brand’s Checklist for Twitter
  From A New Marketing: A few things that every brand can do to enhance their Twitter account and make sure that they reach their goals with the program.
• How to Create the Right Avatar for You and Your Brand
  From Sitepoint: Advice on the ideal way to present yourself in a corporate branded avatar.

Business vs Personal Branding

• The Blending of Corporate and Personal Branding on Twitter
  From Personal Branding Blog: Dan Schawbel analyzes how companies are using Twitter and explores out how personal and corporate brands can function together on the service.
• Blurring Personal and Professional Lives on Social Media
  From Clickz: Aaron Kahlow evaluates the blurring of personal and professional worlds in social media and the potential benefits of such blurring in three venues- Blogs, Facebook and Twitter.
• Using Twitter for Personal and Business Branding
  From Personal Branding Blog – Should you brand yourself or your business on Twitter?
• How To Cleanly Separate Personal and Work Social Media Personalities
  From Louis Gray: Strategies for maintaining your social media presence for your company separately from your own personal social media presence.
• Should You Have One Social Media Identity, or Two? » Media Emerging
  From Media Emerging: This article explores considerations in deciding whether to have two separate social media accounts: one for personal life and one for work life.
• Line Between Business and Personal in Social Networking
  From Kelby Carr: Checklist of five key points to be sure you have made your peace with those business and personal worlds colliding.
• Who Owns Your Twitter or Facebook Connections?
  From Harte Marketing and Communications: Beth Harte reflects on the question of who owns your social media connections if the company you work for is paying you to connect with people on their behalf.
• Personal Branding is Not Business Building
  From Duct Tape Marketing: Discussion of why you shouldn’t confuse personal branding with building a business.
• How to Friend Mom, Dad, and the Boss on Facebook…Safely
  From Read Write Web: Oh no! Your mom just joined Facebook and what’s even worse, she wants to be your friend. More and more people are finding themselves in this situation today and unsure of what to do. Friending mom and dad, the boss, or other work colleagues opens up the details of your private life for the whole world to see – and you might not be entirely comfortable with that. What’s to be done?
• How to “Friend” Someone On Facebook Without Showing Your Status Updates | MakeUseOf.com
  I’m sure that this has happened to you before. Someone you have ties to, whether it’s a co-worker, your boss, or even worse, a parent, has finally discovered social networking and wants to be your newest Facebook friend. Imagine for a moment that I worked at Domino’s Pizza and that I don’t want my boss to know that I just became a fan of Papa John’s (writing this one’s gonna make me hungry). Here’s what I would do to keep that fact confined to my closer friends.
• When One Twitter Account Is Not Enough
  From Twitip: Rundown from Michelle Rafter of possible reasons for maintaining multiple Twitter identities from “keeping different areas of interest separated” to “keeping personal life separate from business life” to “keeping a corporate account separate from a personal account”.
• The 7 Ways to Approach Twitter
  From Mashable: Interesting post from Lon Cohen who talks about the various ways you can brand yourself on Twitter- from “twittering on behalf of yourself” to “twittering for a company” to “playing the part of a classic character” to”blending your approach.”
• How To Selectively Integrate Your Personal And Corporate Twitter Accounts Using RSS And A Hashtag
  From Corporate Dollar: How To instructions for a nifty technique that allows an organization to copy selective tweets from many personal Twitter accounts to a single corporate Twitter account.
• Identity Management For IBMers On Facebook
  From Joshua Scribner: Presentation initially prepared for internal use at IBM, this is a useful guide for segregating personal and work life, and for protecting yourself from identity theft, using Facebook’s privacy setting.

Tools To Manage Social Media Profiles and Identity

• 4 Technologies for Portability in Social Networks: A Primer – ReadWriteWeb
  From Read Write Web: Discussion of 4 technologies that help make identity and data more portable across social networks: hCard; XFN and FOAF; OpenID; and OAuth.
• 25+ Ways to Manage Your Online Identity
  From Mashable: There is nothing more important online than your identity, and nothing more annoying than when someone finds a way to steal it. This list comprises 25+ tools to manage your reputation, officially sign documents, aggregate your social network IDs and more.
• 5 Ways to Share Your Social Media Identity
  From Mashable: Josh Catone reviews five sites that offer social media badges you can share and embed.
• 20 Ways To Aggregate Your Social Networking Profiles
  From Mashable: Review of 20 applications that let you consolidate all your various social networking profiles into one.
• 67 Social Media/web/reputation management tools and sites
  From Social Media Today: Marc Meyers offers a very long list of sites, tools and companies that do some kind of listening, monitoring or reputation management for you. Some are free, some are not.  For more information related to reputation monitoring/management see our posts:  How-To Search the Social Web and Social Media Metrics Superlist.
• Check Username Availability at Multiple Social Networking Sites
  Check to see if your desired username or vanity url is still available at dozens of popular Social Networking and Social Bookmarking websites. Promote your brand consistently by registering a username that is still available on the majority of the most popular sites. Find the best username with namechk.
• How to manage your online identity with Google Alerts | ResumeBear Blog
  From ResumeBear Blog:  Simple step-by-step instructions to set up Google Alerts to manage your online identity.
• FindMeOn.com
  FindMeOn is an online profile management service that connects your identities across social networks, blogs & more! Instead of collapsing all of your network identities onto one site, FindMeOn helps you manage your circles of friends, family, colleagues and others… respecting the divisions of your real life online.
• claimID.com – Manage your online identity
  ClaimID is a free and easy way to manage your online identity with OpenID.   OpenID is a free and easy way to use a single digital identity across the Internet. With one OpenID you can login to all your favorite websites and forget about online paperwork!
• UnHub: Aggregate Your Social Network Profiles On One Page
  UnHub is an online service that lets you aggregate all your social network identities on one page and then easily share that page with others. This page shows persistent iframe bar with tabs for each of your online profiles (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn , Flickr… etc.).
• Cliqset Wants to Unify Your Social Identities
  From Mashable: Similar in purpose to the private beta site Chi.mp, Cliqset’s ultimate goal is to help users connect their online identities in one place so they can then safely share that online social identity with Cliqset-aware applications. Cliqset even claims to be the last social identity you will ever need.
• chi.mp: Own Your Online Identity and Social Network Contacts
  From Mashable: Chi.mp offers a new solution to the online identity conundrum that is one part social identity unifier (like Cliqset) and one part domain registrar and host for your multiple Web personas.
• How to Manage Your Social Profiles and Create Virtual Business Cards
  From Mashable: Review of tools that you can use to manage and share your profiles online more effectively.
• ProfileFly – Share Your Profiles + Contacts + Bookmarks
  Tie all your Profile, Contact, and Bookmark links together in one place, then share them. SIGN UP quickly to create your new URL, so you can promote and share your entire Online Identity
• 5 Ways To Create Your Business Card 2.0 | MakeUseOf.com
  Thankfully, there are a growing number of ways to use the internet to create, share and use your business card. Using these services, you can send your card to others, get contact information in your email (where all your contacts are anyway), and have the business card work with your existing address books, which are increasingly online.

Branding and Digital Branding Books You May Like

Social media has created an explosion of information online.  People are writing on blogs, tweeting, bookmarking, sharing, commenting, etc.

You no doubt want to tap into this wealth of information and learn what people are saying about you, your business, your competitors and the topics you’re interested in.

The challenge is: how to find, filter and process the information you need – the information that will help you do what you want to do.

I touched on the topic of social media monitoring (also known as buzz monitoring) in my Superlist of Social Media Metrics.  Here I’ve gathered a more comprehensive guide to a wide range of resources, websites, services and advice that will help you find, filter, and monitor the information you need more effectively.

Happy Searching!!

Social Search Engines That Search Across Multiple Social Media Sites

• Addictomatic
  Addictomatic searches a wide range of live sites including blogs, micro-blogs, news and video. Search results are displayed in your own custom page.  While you can’t get an RSS feed of your search, you can bookmark it.
• monitorThis
  With MonitorThis you can search in 26 different search engine feeds at the same time including blogs, microblogs and more.
• Samepoint
  Samepoint is a conversation search engine that lets you see what people are talking about. It categorizes Social Mentions, Discussion Points, Bookmarks, Wikis, Network,s B2B Networks, Groups, Life Casting, MicroBlogs, Reviews, Podcasts, Documents, Video, Images, News and Web. There are tabs that let you drill down to results for each category.
• Social Mention
  Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services.
• WhosTalkin?
  WhosTalking is a social media search tool that allows users to search for conversations on multiple social media sites surrounding the topics that they care about most.
• Nsyght
  nsyght is a social search engine powered by you, your bookmarks, and your friends
• Pipes: Social Media Firehose
  This is a social media search for tracking brand or product mentions on a slew of social media sites, including flickr, twitter, friendfeed, digg etc. It taps into their search APIs directly, so it’s much more immediate and comprehensive than say, Google alerts.
• Scour
  Scour is a next generation search engine with Google/Yahoo/MSN results and user comments all on one page. Users get rewarded for using it by collecting points with every search, comment and vote. The points are redeemable for Visa gift cards.
• OneRiot.com – Find the Pulse of the Web
  OneRiot is a social search engine that indexes web pages based on their current popularity with its users, thus focusing on newest and most popular results for a search query rather than a comprehensive overview of the archived web. The ranking is based on input from OneRiot users who have installed the company’s browser extension called the “PulseChecker.”
• Delver – Search Your World
  Delver is an intelligent social search engine that enables you to find, experience and benefit from the wealth of information created and referenced by your own social world.
• Serph — Track buzz in real time.
  Serph is a search engine that you can use to find out what people are saying on the web right now across various sites including: Technorati, Digg, YouTube, Flickr, Google Blog Search, Bloglines, and Newsvine.
• Keotag
  Search engine that allows you to search various social media sites (delicious, facebook, twitter, etc) by tags.
• Aardvark
  Aardvark dubbed by CNET as “social search meets instant messaging.” You send a query to Aardvark via your instant-messenger client. The system determines which people in your network (friends and friends of friends) might be able to answer your question, sends them messages, and then forwards you their replies.
• What Is Real Time Search? Definitions & Players
  From Search Engine Land: There seems to be no end to companies saying they offer real time search these days. And no end to people quoting how Google itself says it wants to improve in the area. But what does real time search really mean? This article offers some definitions and focuses on players in the space.
• Collecta
  The web is alive with real-time information. So why search a stale archive? Collecta monitors the update streams of news sites, popular blogs and social media, and Flickr, so we can show you results as they happen. Give it a try. Click here to return to your running search(es).
• SearchMerge: Real-Time Social Search With a Splash of Google
  From Mashable: Review of SearchMerge, tool that allows you so search multiple websites such as Google (Google reviews), Twitter (Twitter reviews), FriendFeed (FriendFeed reviews), Flickr (Flickr reviews) and YouTube (YouTube reviews) all at once with some cool enhancements include the real-time refresh of SearchMerge results and the timeline view.

Finding Information on Blogs

• Here are a couple of posts that that provide overviews of blog search tools and advice on how to identify blogs in your subject areas:
  • Find Blogs with Blog Search Engines From About.com: A list of some of the most popular blog search engines.
  • Blog Search Engines : The Complete Overview
    From Search Engine Journal: There are a wide array of blog search tools. Here Ann Smarty reviews the four that she finds most useful.
  • Comparing Six Ways to Identify Top Blogs in Any Niche
    From ReadWriteWeb: A comparison of the pros and cons of six different services to identify top blogs for your business.
• Here are direct links to some of the more popular blog search engines:
  • Technorati Search
    Advanced Search feature of leading blog search engine Technorati. You can search by Keyword, Website URL, or Tag.   Technophilia has provided excellent tips on searching with Technorati in 2 posts- 10 Ways to Search with Technorati and 10 More Ways to Search with Technorati
  • Google Blog Search
    Google’s Advanced Blog Search with wide range of search options to target your search. RSS feeds available for searches.
  • Icerocket blog search
    Real-time blog search engine. Trends tracking.
  • Nielsen BuzzMetrics’ BlogPulse
    BlogPulse is an automated trend discovery system & search engine for blogs. Offers buzz-tracking tools for blog content.

Searching on Twitter, Microblogs and Lifestreaming Services

• Twingly Microblog Search
  Searches microblogs like Twitter, Jaiku, Identica and more.
• Advice on Searching Twitter:
  • Learn How to Search Twitter
    From Twitip: Great article on how to search for useful information on Twitter.
  • How To Power Up Your Twitter Search Techniques
    From Twitter Power System: Techniques for harnessing the power of Twitter search.
  • Ultimate Guide to Twitter Hashtags
    From Search Engine Journal: A hashtag is a way to unite global Tweets around some particular topic. Hashtags can help you share and find content around specific topics. Here Ann Smarty provides some tips and resources for making the most of them.
  • Twitter: The Real-Time Answer Engine
    From Twitips: Advice on leveraging Twitter’s real time capability to use it as a ‘help engine’ for getting answers to questions.
  • Take Advantage of Twitter Search Operators
    From Web Worker Daily: Dawn Foster takes a look at the standard operators, with a focus on uses for some very interesting operators that let you filter searches based on location, attitude, posts with links, dates and more, along with some limitations and cautions for each one.
• Twitter Search Tools
  • Advanced Twitter Search
    Advanced Twitter search form allows you to construct a more detailed search query.
  • Twitter Search Operators
    Rundown of search operators that can be used to make your Twitter searches more targeted to your needs.
  • 12 Twitter Directories – Find People & Companies on Twitter
    From Online Marketing Blog: Resources for finding Twitter accounts for brands, companies, executives, analysts and journalists via directories and lists.
  • 6 Twitter Search Services Compared
    From Mashable: Ari Herzog compares six top Twitter search options including their interfaces, their options and the similarity of their results.
  • 8 Excellent Tools to Extract Insights from Twitter Streams
    From Social Media Today: Yung-Hui Lim provides a rundown of Twitter analytic tools that allow you to gain insights from Twitter posts.
  • Tweetscan
    A microblog search tool that searches Twitter and other microblogging sites.  You can set up RSS feeds, email alerts and more.
  • Tweetizen
    Tweetizen is a simple web-based tool designed to help you filter the daily influx of tweets, and easily find the ones that are relevant to you. You can filter them by your interests (tags) or by specific groups of people.
  • The Twitalyzer for Tracking Influence and Measuring Success in Twitter
    Twitalyzer is a unique tool to evaluate the activity of any Twitter user and report on relative influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity, clout, and other useful measures of success in social media.
  • Twilert
    Twilert is a Twitter application that lets you receive regular email updates of tweets containing your brand, product, service, well any keyword you like really.
  • Twist
    Twist is a tool that allows you to track trends on Twitter, similarly to what Google Trends does for Google searches. It gathers tweets as they are posted, filters redundant ones and compiles the rest into two-hour intervals.
  • #hashtags.org
    Hashtags was designed to accommodate the real-time news community. We provide analytic reports and indexing features to allow users to track what’s happening now. Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.
  • Tagalus
    A dictionary for hashtags: Ever find yourself looking at Twitter and wondering what all this talk about #motrinmoms means? Searching Flickr and not understanding why someone would tag their photo #ip4? Tagalus helps you get definitions for specific hashtags.
  • MicroPlaza
    MicroPlaza looks at your Twitter network and displays all the links shared by the people you follow with associated tweets. It’s a way to discover relevant and interesting items from the people you follow on Twitter. Billed as your “personal micro-news agency”.
  • BackTweets
    Nice twitter tool that lets you enter in a domain and see all tweets that link to articles on the domain even if people have used short url tools to link to the domain.
• How to Use the New FriendFeed Search for Social Media Intelligence
  From ReadWriteWeb: Review the new Friendfeed tool and provides examples of how the tool can be used to discover people, conversations, trends and more across the social web.
• FriendFeed Search
  Advanced Search page of Friendfeed – a service that lets users aggregate all of their social accounts including Delicious, Twitter, blog, and other social media accounts and pull them together into a single feed.  The advanced search features lets you search through posts, comments and other shared information using advanced search operators. You can set parameters to search for posts that were liked by specific number of other users or those that have a certain number of comments.  You can even search for entries from a specific user’s friends.
• FriendFeed Search: Filtering for Popularity and Relevance
  From Web Worker Daily: Advice from Dawn Foster on using Friendfeed’s advanced search features.

Message Boards and Forum Search Tools

• BoardTracker.com
  A forum search engine, message tracking and instant alerts system designed to provide relevant information quickly and efficiently while ensuring you never miss an important forum thread no matter where or when it is posted.
• Omgili
  Omgili is a specialized search engine that focuses on “many to many” user generated content platforms, such as, Forums, Discussion groups, Mailing lists, answer boards and others. Also offered is a real time search feature called Omgili Stream which provides a real-time feed of discussions taking place in thousands of forums and other discussion-based platforms.

Conversations and Comments Search Tools

• Artiklz
  A conversation search engine that aggregates discussions and comments from many popular blogging and commenting platforms along with a number of services including Digg, Reddit, FriendFeed, Delicious, etc. and makes them available through a single search engine.
• coComment – Join the conversation
  coComment is a service for managing, powering and researching conversations online. When using coComment, you can keep track of your comments across any site, share them with friends, and get notified when you get a response.
• BackType
  BackType is a service that lets you find, follow and share comments from across the web.
• Comments Tool : Commentful
  Commentful is a service that watches comments/follow-ups on Blog posts, Digg submissions, Flickr galleries, and many other types of content. When ever there is an update, i.e a new follow-up, Commentful notifies you instantly. To use Commentful, either login or register(it’s free!)
• ConvoTrack: Track Conversations Surrounding Any Blog Post
  From Make Use Of: Discussion of ConvoTrack, a comment aggregation app that lets you easily track comments and conversations surrounding any blog article. It shows comments from Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit, HackerNews and blogs. Easy bookmarklet you can drag to your browser toolbar.
• Talk Digger
  Tool that helps you find, follow and join conversations across the web.
• 13 Tools For Tracking Discussions in the Blogosphere
  From Mashable: Sean P. Aune has gathered together 13 trackers on a number of subjects for you to check out.

Finding Information on Social News, Bookmarking and Other Social Media Sites

• The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users
  From Slacker Manager: Helpful advice for making the most of social bookmarking site Delicious.
• 6 Ways To Make Life Easier With Del.icio.us
  From Dave Fleet: More great advice on using the social bookmarking site Delicious more effectively.
• Diigo
  A research and collaborative research tool on the one hand and a knowledge-sharing community and social content site on the other. Similar to Delicious, but also allows you to highlight web pages, add sticky notes and keep bookmarks in other bookmarking sites up to date.
• Digg Search
  Digg’s advanced search allows you to search for stories other users have liked by title, description, and/or url. You can search for all stories, recently submitted stories and stories which have appeared on the front page (most popular).
• Digg Search Tools
  About.com: Review of Digg tools (e.g. buttons, toolbars, bookmarklets that let you search Digg stories.
• Search Digg With Google
  Digg Search is a very optimized search engine powered by google allowing you to search efficiently through Digg
• similicio.us – find similar sites
  Type in a url for a website or article that you like and this site will find other websites you might like based on people’s tags/bookmarks on del.icio.us.
• delizzy – del.icio.us Bookmarks Search Engine
  Del.icio.us is a great service, but when you search through your bookmarks, you are only searching through tags, titles and descriptions, not the page content. del.izzy lets you search through all content, including title, description and page content, for all your bookmarks.
• 50 Matches.com | Home
  Only crawls web sites that were bookmarked or voted for by people, in sites like del.icio.us, digg and reddit. They link to sites with the best content, and it gives you the best quality search engine on the web. You can also call it Social Powered Search.
• Facebook Search Tips
  Advice from Facebook’s help pages on searching for people and their content
• For a broader overview of social bookmarketing and news see our introductory post: Social News and Bookmarketing 101.
• Wikirank: Find What’s Trending on Wikipedia
  From Mashable: Overview of Wikirank, a nifty analytics tool that tracks trending topics on the world’s largest online encyclopedia, displays the 10 most read articles in the last 30 days, and gives users the ability to compare stats for up to four different topics.
• Facebook Search Tips
  Advice from Facebook’s help pages on searching for people and their content.
• Craiglook: Better Local Search For Craigslist
  From Make Use Of: Craiglook is a mash up which combines Yahoo Pipes and Google Maps to create better Craigslist search engine which restricts its search to listings related to the area you specify. You can enter your city or a zip code and then specify a mile radius using a horizontal slider on the site. Then you could choose the categories or search for the product or the service you are looking for.
• The Most Useful StumbleUpon Feature You May Not Have Known
  From Blogging Bits: Hidden in the obscure StumbleUpon toolbar settings is thes search feature – here’s the scoop on how to access it.

Brand Monitoring Tools and Techniques

• HowSociable?
  This sites Measures a brand’s visibility across some 22 social media sites. Enter brand name and see results for sites such as Technorati, Facebook, Twitter and more.
• Trendpedia
  Social media monitoring, buzz tracking, brand measurement and blog trend search.
• Online Reputation Management Beginner’s Guide
  Download this free PDF from Marketing Pilgrim with detailed information on tracking and managing your company’s reputation online- includes what to track and how to track it. A must-read resource!
• Top 10 Free Tools for Monitoring Your Brand’s Reputation
  From Mashable: Brand monitoring has become an essential task for any individual or corporation. This article outlines a process for montoring your brand online and a list of the top 10 free tools for doing this.
• Social Media Listening Wiki
  From Beth Kanter- A wiki offering a range of information, resources, links and tools on social media listening (e.g. monitoring).
• 8 More Free Social Media Monitoring Tools You Shouldn’t Leave Home Without
  From Marketing Pilgrim: Addition of 8 more tools to original list of 26 free social media monitoring tools.
• How To Manage Your Online Reputation
  From ReadWriteWeb: Review of ways you can use the web and various applications to stay on top of your online reputation or track any keyword of your choosing without having to shell out a large, monthly fee.
• egoSurf – ego searching without the guilt.
  Enter your name (or a keyword) and your web site url, and egoSurf will search Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Technorati and del.icio.us for mentions of your site. Select “more options” to run your search on more engines than just Google.
• 6 Quick Tips To Optimize How You Monitor Your Digital Footprint
  How to use the social media monitoring tools most effectively to monitor your digital footprint, personal brand and the products and services you represent.
• Buzz Tracking And Social Media Monitoring: Best Tools To Do Ego Searching And Find Out Who Is Talking About Me – Mini-Guide
  From Robin Good: Nice review of best free tools to do ego-searching, buzz tracking and social media monitoring of yourself or of your web site.
• For more on social media  monitoring, see our Superlist of Social Media Metrics.

Managing Your Search Information: Advice on Aggregation & Filtering

• HOW TO: Use Google Reader Like A Rockstar
  From Mashable: Quick how-to guide for using Google’s popular RSS reader- Google Reader.  For more information on RSS readers and using RSS readers to manage information online see our introductory post:  RSS 101.
• How to Track 500 Business Blogs in 10 Minutes a Day
  From Mashable: Listening is an important part of developing your social media strategy. This helpful post by Aaron Uhrmacher (my fellow alum from NYU’s Interactive Telecom Grad program) – a simple guide to maximize the number of conversations that you can listen to using the smallest amount of company time.
• More Efficient RSS Reading
  From Web Worker Daily: The harsh reality is that there are only so many hours in the day one can spend reading and learning. Here are some tips for using your RSS reader more productively.
• How to Build a Reputation Monitoring Dashboard
  From aimClear Blog: An essential aspect of any reputation management job, is monitoring the never-ending flow of content germane to our client. Most often the keyword monitoring “Big List” includes brand, products, C-level executive names, intent phrases and competitors’ keyword permutations. This post is a guerrilla tutorial for building a totally free reputation monitoring dashboard.
• How to: Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet for Any Topic
  From ReadWriteWeb: Step-by-step instructions, with screen shots, for a process to get up to speed on the social media activity in your field or market as fast as you can
• A Quick ‘n Dirty Guide to Setting up Social Media Monitoring
  From Social Media Explorer: A quick and dirty guide to setting up basic social media monitoring, using free tools and only a half hour or less per day.

Finding People On the Social Web

• Finally, there may be times when you want to get information about people on the social web.  Perhaps you’re looking to get the profile of someone who’s commenting on a blog.  Maybe you’d like to identify influential bloggers in your area of interest.  Perhaps you want to grow your social network.  Check out my post Ultimate How-To Grow Your Social Network for a comprehensive collection of tips and tools to help you find and connect with people online.