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.

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.

(Today’s post is contributed by Jim Pearson, a senior, doing his undergraduate work in Information Technology at the B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Jim is presently working as a coop at Cazbah in the IT department.)

When I was growing up, my Dad instilled in me early on a love for technology and all things computer related. He has always had a passion for it himself and thankfully, he passed that torch on to me.

Over the course of my years, I have seen technology change and develop at an exponential rate. This of course has impacted the way the normal person does business in a vast amount of ways. When we got our first family computer, it was (by standards then) a moderate machine. If memory serves it was a Pentium 166 with 32 Megabytes of ram.

Now though, you could buy that computer for around the cost of a dinner at any restaurant. Its mind boggling to think just how far we have come in the past 20 years with computers. Just the other day, I was in the kitchen talking to my parents and my phone rang. I checked it and casually replied “Oh, I have an email”. My Mom looked at me like I had grown a third arm. She couldn’t believe I could get email on my phone. I told her all the other things it could do (email, texting, Internet browsing) and her only reply was “It still makes calls, right?”. We laughed but shes right, my phone now is more of a computer than our family PC was for 10 years.

That’s not it either, as computers become more advanced so do the things we do with them. I can remember a time…a time before Facebook, before Twitter, and when Myspace was just starting out. If someone said the word “blog” you thought they were speaking some other language. In such a short span of time, the Internet (along with computers) has completely changed. People are able to stay in contact with just about anyone in the world. Companies are able to reach out to customers they were previously denied. Nothing, seemingly, is off limits with access to the Internet.

The biggest obstacle is actually knowing how to use the technology available to you, and using it to your advantage. It can be extremely daunting to someone unfamiliar with it, and that can breed hesitation to try new things. The best advice I can give someone who is in that position is to simply ask. Find someone who knows about it and sit them down. Once you know the pros and cons, then make a decision, don’t let fear of the unknown or untested scare you.

Technology has changed drastically in the past 10 years, and it shows no signs of slowing down. Embrace it. Adapt and grow with it because as it continues to change (and believe me, it will), the structure of the world and business around you will change with it.

Are you up for it?

I heard an interesting interview with Chris Brogan the other day. Chris, who is recognized as an expert in the social media space, was being interviewed about his use of Twitter, the micro-blogging utility that has become so popular of late. Among the various and sundry ideas that were tossed around was a comment about how he loathes getting blatant sales pitches from people who he doesn’t know, who are following him. No one on the interview had a good term, or any term for that matter, to describe this Twitter equivalent to junk mail or SPAM.

Well divine light has shown down upon me. Ladies and gentlemen, I have that term! And the term is, “TWACK.” Now I realize that sounds kind of goofy but, follow my logic. As with all words in the twitter lexicon, it begins with the letters T & W, as in Twittonary (Twitter Dictionary). This is a cool tool you can use to look up the meaning of anything and everything on twitter. “TWACK” also sounds like Elmer Fudd in hot pursuit of Bugs Bunny. “Be vewy, vewy quiet. I’m twack-ing a wabbit! Huhuhuhuhu…” LOL

Most birds chirp and tweet, the later being the term used to describe a micro-post (140 characters or less) by anyone on twitter. These chirps and tweets are melodious sounds that are pleasing to the ear. Ducks, by comparison, quack which to anyone but a duck hunter is not a melodious or pleasing sound. A “Quack” is also a derogatory term used to describe a doctor of ill repute or perhaps a shyster. The word “Quack” is rather abrasive and obnoxious, which is in keeping with the previous comment. The term “TWACK” is also rather abrupt and harsh, when you say it. Try it out. It also sounds similar to “whack,” which is to hit or strike something with a resounding blow.

This gets to the real meaning of the term. Twitter is a great utility for communicating (one to many) short bursts of information. The content on Twitter ranges from the typical “what I am doing right now,” to quasi chatting.

As with all communications mediums there are those people who choose to throw a blatant sales pitch at everyone (everything that moves actually) in the hopes of attracting an ignorant few with their message. Chris Brogan referred to this as marketing with a Bull Horn. As I alluded to above, this is abrasive and obnoxious and it flies directly in the face of what Social Media is all about.

TWACKING then, is the equivalent to Twitter SPAMING, and is the quickest way to become un-followed, or UF’d, by pretty much everyone. The bottom line is, nobody wants to hear your sales pitch without getting to know you first.

Chris had a more colorful description for this sort of TWACKING when he said (and I paraphrase), “It’s like you’re trying to French kiss me and stick your tongue in my mouth when we haven’t even shaken hands yet.”

You get the point!