Given that in four days I will have officially been at my current job for three years – god, has it really been that long? – I feel it’s only appropriate to start ramping up this blog again after almost a year of neglect.

And let me tell you, a lot has happened in this past year.  For starters, my company is almost entirely under new management.  Most important to me was the induction of a new VP of marketing back in, oh, May of this year, and from that, the creation of a proper marketing “team,” the likes of which I hadn’t seen in quite some time.  With others handling the stuff that used to take up much of my time – organizing trade shows, for example – I was free to nestle into my role as the company’s Online Marketing Manager.

Some of you might recall a few of the posts I wrote last fall (1 | 2 | 3) that dealt with the ever-present problem of companies not taking advantage of all that social media has to offer.  Quite frankly, while back then I was definitely pushing for the creation of a social media plan, I found myself falling into the same scenario to which Paul Chaney alludes in his post yesterday, entitled “Social Media in Organizations: What Happens When You’re the Only One Talking?“  That is to say, my social media efforts did more to boost my own personal brand than my company’s.

Buuut … things have changed now.  Our VP of marketing is very, very open to the use of social media as a marketing tool, and I presented him with a plan for the next six months that includes, among other venues, current statistics, strategy going forward, and metrics for our company website and blog (yes, we finally have a blog after months of me yipping about it!), Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and so forth.

Look for a string of posts to appear in the next few weeks regarding social media marketing best practices.  I’m looking forward to getting this show back on the road!

I was never the queen of the popular crowd.  But I do have a core group of really good friends, and I have a lot of other friends all around the world, all at different places in life, all with different personal goals, dreams, and aspirations.

And some of them I’ve never met in person.

With the rise in popularity of social networks comes a rise in virtual friend-making.  For me, each social network represents a different set of people that I ‘know.’

Facebook

Without question, this is the place through which I keep in touch with people that I’ve known personally in the past.  From buddies I’ve had since kindergarten, to those guys I met at a poker night last week at a mutual friend’s house, this is essentially my virtual uber-address book.  If I’m looking to send Christmas cards to people, I get their addresses here.  If I need to text a friend, but I just got a new phone that has none of my numbers in it, I get their phone number here.  If I want to check the status of my good friends’ relationship, I can find that out immediately here (and as an aside, why is everyone I know getting engaged at the same time?).  With the exception of less than five friends on my list of 400+, I have met all of my Facebook connections in real life, and I don’t intend to change that policy.

LinkedIn

Most of us have high expectations for our respective careers, and networking is key to success.  Thus LinkedIn came into the picture.  Like Facebook, I have met 99% of my connections in person; I’ve worked with them, done consulting for them, or graduated from the same university as them.  I use LinkedIn for business reasons: for problem-solving, for discussion, for recruiting, and for recommending people I admire.

MySpace

I started out limiting my MySpace friends to only those people I know from real life encounters, but it has since spiralled a bit out of control.  Now, though I check MySpace infrequently at most, my friends list includes a hodge-podge of people I have met in real life, musical artists and actors I admire, and randoms who either boost my mob size in the application Mobsters or those people who just look like they would be interesting.  I see no real use to MySpace, and thus don’t usually include it in my top lists of social networks, but I figure most of you know it and/or have used it and would be interested in hearing my thoughts.

Twitter

Honestly, I think I’ve met perhaps ten of my followers in real life, and the same applies for those people I’m following.  I use discretion when following people; I will never be one of those users (and you know who they are) who follow multiple thousands of people in the hopes that they build their followers list.  That kind of thinking doesn’t work for me.  Instead, I have chosen those I follow selectively: either they are social media aficionados and marketing professionals, or they mention an interest in their bio that really catches my eye, like “video game developer” or “entrepreneur” or “start-up junkie.”  And from the looks of it, most of my followers are doing the same thing.

How do you handle your social networks?  Are each of them dedicated to a specific group of people in your life, or do you not make any exceptions when inviting connections or accepting invitations?

• Virtual Going Out is the New Going Out
  
• The Social Networking Advantage
• Virtual Friends = Real Friends?
• Social Networking Is About Real Friends

That’s exactly what the engineers over at Inuda Innovations want to figure out. HowSociable? is the nifty new tool for those of you who wish to gauge how big of a presence and how much visibility your company or brand has on some of the top social media outlets, including Del.icio.us, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Technorati.

Though still in its infancy – the first prototype was only made available at the end of May, and even then they had “only spent a week building it” – HowSociable? has already measured over 7500 brands as of approximately fifteen minutes ago, and the number is quickly rising. Do note that many of the brands measured are actually just people’s names; I definitely checked mine, and apparently I’m not being sociable enough to have my name splashed all over the ‘Net … though that could be perceived as a good thing, I suppose.

Brands are measured based on a sliding scale that begins with a rank of 1000 for internationally-known brands such as Coca-Cola, and it goes down from there. The ranking system is a good start, but even the developers realize there is much to be altered within it – just think of the Google PageRank algorithm – and so they’ve launched a Feedback Forum for users to post their suggestions for the tool.

In any case, it’s a fabulously interesting concept, and I suggest you try it out for yourself.

• Seduction is a Social Media Tactic to Build Your Brand Online
• The Brand Called You and Misspelled Social Networks
• 5 Easy Ways to Market Yourself Online

Curt Monash – leading analyst and author of “The Explosion in DBMS Choice,” my company’s latest sponsored white paper – pointed me to an online discussion he did yesterday over at NetworkWorld in which he gives his take on using social media/networking as a business advantage rather than viewing it, as so many companies do, as simply a waste of time.

His discussion veered toward his opinion that blogs are far more important than social networks like Facebook and MySpace, even going so far as to say, “If the latter are useful at all, they’re for faddish things like rock bands.” On the importance of blogs, Curt makes comments throughout the discussion, including the ones below.

Can you cite some examples where Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites were used to build business?

As far as I’m concerned, blogging is by far the most important aspect of social networking. It lets me communicate however I want, on whatever schedule I want. It rocks. It’s pretty much the only way I market, so I can say that a huge fraction of my revenue is derived from blogging.

How do blogs fit into a typical enterprise’s online strategy and how *should* they fit in?

Blogs serve at least two – only somewhat overlapping – purposes:

A. The constantly-hyped one of “participating in the conversation.”

B. As a simple flexible platform for publishing what you want, when you want, in the tone you want.

Enterprises constantly overlook B, because they’re too intimidated by what they’ve been told about the “right” and “wrong” ways to blog. In particular, the way IT vendors and many other kinds of companies tell customer stories is stilted and broken, and blogs offer a way out that almost nobody seizes.

Why is it a mistake for companies not to own their own blog software? Doesn’t it make more sense to use the many blogging options already available?

WordPress is a fine choice of software. Indeed, it’s better software than you’ll find on any general site, including Wordpress.com itself. More to the point, you brand your URL. So you should own and control the URL.

I recommend that you take the time to read the entire discussion, entitled Making Friends with Twitter, Forums, and Blogs. Curt is an expert analyst when it comes to information technology, especially in the database sector, but he clearly has a wide knowledge of the Internet, and marketing within it.