More and more as I speak to clients about social media they ask where they can find the material that will help them understand this medium. I find myself sending links and blog posts from the same social media champions time and again.  I thought it would be a good idea to list the top 7 resources in this blog because finding pertinent and timely information in the social media realm can be daunting to say the least. When you dive into these 7 websites you will get a comprehensive look at business and marketing resources that can help guide your small business through this vast maze of wonderfulness.

Mashable
Founded in 2005, Mashable is the top source for news in social and digital media, technology and web culture. With more than 40 million monthly pageviews, Mashable is the most prolific news site reporting breaking web news, providing analysis of trends, reviewing new websites and services, and offering social media resources and guides. Mashable’s audience includes early adopters, social media enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, influencers, brands and corporations, marketing, PR and advertising agencies, Web 2.0 aficionados and technology journalists. Mashable is also popular with bloggers, Twitter and Facebook users — an increasingly influential demographic.

Chris Brogan
Chris Brogan consults and speaks professionally with Fortune 100 and 500 companies on the future of business communications, and social software technologies. He is a featured monthly columnist at Entrepreneur Magazine. Chris’s blog is in the Top 5 of the Advertising Age Power150. He has over 11 years experience in online community, social media, and related technologies. Chris is involved in dozens of start-ups and non-profits. I met Chris while taking video at a social media seminar and he autographed his New York Times bestselling book Trust Agents for me. After reading it I went from an interested bystander in social media to changing my career to internet and social media marketing. It was that profound for me.

Brian Solis
Brian Solis is globally recognized as one of the most prominent thought leaders and published authors in new media. A digital analyst, sociologist, and futurist, Solis has influenced the effects of emerging media on the convergence of marketing, communications, and publishing. His blog, BrianSolis.com is among the world’s leading business and marketing online resources, ranking among the top 1% of all blogs tracked by Technorati. Solis is also ranked as one of the leading voices in the AdAge Power 150 index of worldwide marketing bloggers. He actively contributes to FastCompany, BusinessWeek, AdAge, Harvard Business Review, and Mashable.

ProBlogger
Australian Darren Rowse started ProBlogger in September of 2004. This site is dedicated to helping other bloggers learn the skills of blogging, share their own experiences and promote the blogging medium. This is a rich resource for all thing blogging whether it is for a small business, personal, or for your company. Explore the categories to find what type of blogging interests you the most. Be sure to sign up for Darren’s 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Project. Not for the light hearted but it will most assuredly get you started on the right blogging foot.

ReadWriteWeb
ReadWriteWeb was founded on April 20, 2003, by Richard MacManus and grew his blog about the changing Internet into an international team of journalists. ReadWriteWeb is now one of the most widely read and respected blogs in the world, known for offering insightful analysis about each day’s Internet industry news.

Social Media Examiner
Social Media Examiner is a free online magazine designed to help businesses discover how to best use social media tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to find leads, increase sales and generate more brand awareness.  Technorati and AdAge rank Social Media Examiner as one of the world’s Top 100 business blogs. Offering a unique single source of knowledge, the site contains comprehensive articles and videos on how to use the best social media tools, along with original case studies, reviews of the latest industry research and advice direct from the world’s leading experts.

Social Media Today
Launched in 2007 Social Media Today is a collaborative blog, publishing great posts from the web’s best thinkers on social technology. From networking & community building to marketing & trend analysis and help people understand what’s going on in social media. Because Social Media Today works in collaboration with many other social media devotees it offers some of most diverse content.

There are hundreds of websites, blogs and articles that can provide you with great information regarding social media for small business, but let’s start with these seven. There are sites concerning only Facebook marketing, Twitter marketing, LinkedIn marketing, YouTube, WordPress etc. The sites above will give a holistic view and then you can drill down to your specific niche of interest.

What are your favorite social media resources? Write back, we would love to know.

Speak your blog.

There are many reasons why businesses aren’t blogging today and the number one reason I hear is that people just don’t have the time. Other excuses are; they don’t like to sit down and type or people don’t know how to spell that well or every time they have a great idea they’re not in front of a keyboard or don’t have any paper on them.  I wanted to show you through this Mobile Phone application called Dragon Dictation that you don’t have to sit at a keyboard, you can write your own content or speak your own content right into this application as I’m doing via my iPhone 4.

You can find Dragon Dictation on the Apple App Store, and here’s the big kicker, it’s for free.  Dragon Dictation is an easy-to-use voice recognition application powered by Nuance Communications that allows you to speak easily and instantly see your text or e-mail messages. In fact, it’s up to five times faster than typing on your keyboard. With Dragon Dictation you can also dictate status updates directly to your social networking applications like Facebook and Twitter or send notes and reminders to yourself all using your own voice.  So when you’re on the go, stop typing and start speaking from one short text messages to longer e-mail messages and anything in between. Right now Dragon Dictation currently supports US English, UK English and German and French. Italian and Spanish support will be added later this year.

I’ve tried other dictation to text devices before and by far Dragon works the best.

Some things to consider when using Dragon, is that if you shut off the application after you were  finished without copying you could lose your work so I suggest when you are done to immediately copy it and paste into a notes application which I’ve done for this process.

Coming up with fresh content isn’t always easy,  sometimes great ideas come to you when you least expect it, so now when you say you don’t have time to write a blog…..  It’s as easy as speaking the words, saving and copy-paste. With this application there shouldn’t be any new excuses why you couldn’t write a blog for your website.

So that’s it. Now this blog is written. All I had to do now was edit, make sure all the words make sense and if I had miss spoke to correct that, and also make sure that all the punctuation marks are placed correctly within my sentences.

Hopefully for some, this will solve the problem of  you don’t have time to write good content or you’re not a very good typist. So please speak your mind into the comments section, we would love to know what you think about this.

(This blog was written about 90% through the dictation application. You can click HERE and see the unedited version. Admittedly most of the corrections I had to make was because I misspoke or didn’t convey the actual thought I intended. It took me about 15 minutes to dictate and copy text to this blog. It took another 15 minutes to edit, and this is the first time I ever did this kind of thing.  Absolutely amazing how much time I saved and how easy this was. Below is a short tutorial on how Dragon Dictation works).

There’s nothing better than a fired-up client … a client eager to spend resources and energy on doing smart things in a smart way … a client ready for results and willing to do what it takes to get them.

And there’s nothing worse than having to tell that client to holster it back up because they aren’t ready to pull the trigger.

That is sometimes the situation we find ourselves in when our small business clients are interested in implementing social media strategies before they have made sure that the location they are driving traffic to – usually their Web site – is prepared to handle the traffic.

When it comes to marketing their own brand, many small- and mid-sized businesses are working with limited resources.  So a decision to increase focus in one area often inadvertently becomes a decision to decrease attention in another.

Embarking on a social media strategy is a major undertaking for any company, an effort that often manages to soak up a lot of internal resources.  This can mean that the more mundane efforts it takes to update the company Web site can often go ignored, leaving the place you are trying to drive more traffic to looking something less than its best. Why is this a problem?  Because social media efforts are just a means to an end, with your final goal being to convert traffic into sales.

It’s important that the first step of your social media strategy be taking a look at your Web site and making sure it is an effective end-destination for every tweet, blog post and shared video.

• Are there clear “calls to action” throughout your Web site?
• Are your products and service pages current, accurate and complete?
• If you are targeting a specific audience with specific services/products needs in your social media efforts, are those services/products easily found?
• Are your contact pages updated and complete?  Is it easy for customers to continue the dialog that you started with a social media vehicle?
• Is your Web site content of interest to your social media audiences?

Pages that need simple corrections should be taken care of right away.  Any section that needs more extensive effort should be avoided as landing pages for social media traffic.  Once you are comfortable that your Web site is ready and able to do handle the new traffic, your company can feel comfortable in taking its first shot at social media success.

This content continues to get a ton of traffic elsewhere on the web so, I figured I would include it here for your viewing pleasure. This is extremely relevant information related to the development of effective communications with your potential customers.

Everything in this post is as relevant today in the Social Marketing space as it is in the dirt-world. As you will see, it’s all about communication…

Unlike the Broadway musical of the same name, the AIDA that I am referring to is not the story of timeless love between a Nubian princess and an Egyptian prince, but rather the 4 “timeless” fundamental elements of effective marketing communications.

Attention
Your audience is barraged by thousands of different marketing messages and communication inputs every day of their lives. This is only going to get worse now that we have embarked on yet another communications revolution on the web (Social Media). Ensuring that your message is seen and read will mean the difference between success and failure.

Keep in mind that “It’s Not About You!” Get your ego out of it. Your headline, in the case of an ad, or subject line, in the case of an email communication, or blog post, should be a bold and compelling benefit statement that “hits the reader where they live.” It should address some aspect of their need, that you are responding to, or the problem that you are solving. Make it as personal as you possibly can!

A good starting point is to make sure you know who you are communicating with or who you would like to communicate your message to. Remember that Search engines feed on blog posts and all other forms of online communications (web pages, twitter feeds, etc). Make sure that your content will draw the right crowd.

Most email management programs on the market today will allow you to personalize your message with the recipient’s name in the subject line, which has been shown to be highly effective in getting email messages noticed and read. By the way, non-spam email is still the highest rate of conversion on the web today.

Interest
Ask yourself, “what can I say (truthfully) that will grab my audience’s attention, and get them to read my entire communication?” Look around in your own world. What is it about the messages that you look at or read that gets your attention? Follow suite with your communications. An effective way of establishing interest is to ask a question, or several questions, that give your audience a reason to continue reading.

Capturing interest always has to do with the establishment of value in your readers mind. Don’t forget that. Don’t be overly concerned with the length of your content. It’s a known fact that long copy sells. This assumes that the copy is good, of course, and that you continue to focus and to build on the unique value that you are offering to your audience.

Desire
This is the set up for the grand finale… It’s very important that you get this part right. If you don’t, all your efforts up to this point will be for naught. Don’t underestimate the power of this element. It has been said that the purpose of advertising is to evoke an emotional response. Similarly, your task is to reach out and generate DESIRE (an emotion) with your audience. Getting a bit more technical, you want to stimulate the amygdalae (brain tonsils), which have been shown in research to perform a primary role in the processing of memory and emotional reactions.

Sound challenging, like brain surgery? It’s not. There are a couple techniques that are surefire ways of establishing desire. The first involves telling your readership, in bold and vivid detail, what they will get when they purchase your product or service, in the case of an advertisement. I.e., what’s in it for them. As I said earlier, don’t be overly concerned about the length of your copy.

The second technique involves the use of a customer testimonial, which is a statement of praise and testimony from an existing customer. This alleviates the “Guinea Pig” factor — the concern that they are the first to buy or use your product or service. Additionally, your future customers would like to know that they are in good company with other folk within their peer group. Testimonials are a great way to achieve this.

Action
In a word, this is where you CLOSE the deal. Be specific and keep it simple. Tell your reader exactly what to do and then make it easy for them to follow your instructions. If you have done everything correctly up to this point, this should be very straightforward.

Something as simple as “Lean More,” “Free Trial Offer,” “Contact Us Now,” or “Order Now,” is generally all that’s required. Make sure that you have a simple to use form or template for your reader to fill out and submit, or the whole thing falls apart!