I encourage you to go to thirdtribemarketing.com and take a one-month test drive.  (I hate that you can’t get in at the discounted price of $27 a month I got, but, hey, better late than never, right?)

The forums are actually pretty cool – lots of people sharing resources for what works online: video delivery, blog plug-ins, etc.  It’s worth the money just for that, IMHO.

(Not a paid solicitation or affiliate relationship – just sharing something I think is cool.)

For those of you that missed the intro to this, I’m working my way through Dale Evans’ Social Media Marketing: An Hour A Day.  This is the very first week’s worth of exercises.  What do I learn?

Monday

Blogs & Wikis

For me personally, this is pretty familiar territory: I’ve been blogging since around 2004, and while I haven’t created or managed a wiki before, I’m pretty familiar with the concept (Wikipedia, etc.).

Still, Evans leads me to some resources I’d heard of but wasn’t too familiar with before, like boingboing.net (news of the weird and wonderful), mashable.com (weird and wonderful, techie-style), and communityguy.com (at first blush, looks like an overview of social media trends/opinions/news) for the blogs.  While both Wikipedia and the wiki at One Laptop Per Child are both wikis, they have entirely different purposes (the former acting as a repository for shared knowledge, the latter for shared projects).  None of these were really meant as definitive resources — just examples.

Finding Social Content

I’ve used (and registered with) Technorati before, so I’m familiar with how it works.  Blogpulse/Blogpulse Trend were new to me.  (Google’s Blogsearch and Trends tools I knew about.)  All of these got bookmarked for future research projects.  Blogpulse was interesting; their Trend service is so similar to Google Trends as to be almost redundant (I didn’t do a head-to-head comparison on the same search – maybe later).

How useful is any of this?  Certainly, the search tools present more ways of finding relevant content, so I can discover new blogs to subscribe to, comment on, send some link love to, etc.  And the trending tools can provide some prompts for writing subjects that can draw traffic.

Tuesday

Multimedia

Today’s lesson concentrates on multimedia sites like Flickr and YouTube.  I was familiar with some of these as a casual user (one as registered, regular user).

Flickr — Started off on the wrong foot here.  Went through the tour, got through Yahoo signup as required, then found myself in an endless login hell loop (they couldn’t find the ID I’d just signed up for, but when I went to Yahoo to try again, they said that ID (which was available when I signed up for it) was already taken.  AAAAARGH!).  Cool features, but the signup snafu has me remembering why I stopped using my previous Yahoo account.

Photobucket — Photos and video together plus more.  If I hadn’t wasted so much time on my Flickr registration, I’d have spent more time here.

Seesmic — I don’t get this at first glance.  It links to my Twitter account, but what else does it do?  Would like to see a tutorial, but there doesn’t seem to be one.  I seem to be forever stuck in Preview mode.

Metacafe — Pretty cool, actually – looks like a sort of legal YouTube (not that YouTube isn’t legal, just that so much of what’s uploaded is copyrighted by other people).  Right now, it looks like a place to play rather than a place to work, though.

Personal Life Media — Ditto – mostly personal, not work.

The Bonus Exercise

As an illustration, Evans has readers go through a series of links related to the Nike+ Running Shoe – write-ups and videos, some “official” Nike material, some not.

First problem: the link Evans gives to the YouTube video from Nike doesn’t work, so I have to find what I hope is the same video he’s referring to (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOr5_GaGnPc).  It would have been better if he could have given it as a bit.ly or other shortened link; I typed the link he cited twice, but given the user-hostile link format, I could have had two different sets of typos.  Or the video could have since been removed or replaced.

Next problem: the query link Evans provides to Flickr, rather than yielding “a photo of a ‘hacked’ running shoe,” yields several pages of irrelevant content.  The specific link to Callum Alden’s photo works better, however.

Third problem: the link provided to the metacomment blog post has all the text, but the photo illustrations have been removed.

So the bonus exercise taught me mostly how ephemeral online content is. <sigh>

Wednesday

Microblogs and Tagging

Again, some familiar territory (Twitter), some not (Pownce – just as well, it’s closed now; Tumblr – which looks more full-fledged than a micro-blog; Plurk – Twitter with a threaded timeline), and one repeat (Seesmic, again?  I didn’t really get it the first time).   I’m headed into TMI Overwhelm.  I honestly don’t think I want more than one of these kinds of accounts at a time (and I’m on Twitter already).

Moving on … tagging looks more promising (Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and Ma.gnolia).   I had set up a Delicious account a while back, but really hadn’t used it much.  StumbleUpon I’d heard of but not really explored, so I did that now — will explore more later.  And Ma.gnolia … well, they’ve since gone “invitation only,” so that’s a dead-end for me.

Thursday

RSS

Again, pretty familiar territory — I’ve been subscribing to blogs, etc., via RSS in Google Reader for a long time now.  I’ll be looking forward to anything Evans shares on how to tweak your own outgoing RSS feeds.

Friday

Social Networks

Ditto — I have accounts on most, if not all, of these social networks.

Overview

Week 1 gave me a good sense of where some services I already subscribe to fit into the overall social media schema and introduced me to a few new ideas.  Looking forward to Week 2 – The Social Feedback Cycle.

I have a confession to make: I buy a lot of how-to books. A lot of them. And I’m not always good about applying all the wonderful knowledge they contain.

But if I want to achieve certain goals within the next year (give or take), I need to acquire some new skills. Hey, I’m always up for new skills. But I have to be more systematic about getting them.

So, in a “Julie/Julia Project” burst of inspiration, I’ve decided to publicly commit to following Dave Evans’ Social Media Marketing: An Hour A Day (Note: not an affiliate link) book between now and 2010 to learn how to leverage social media tools.

If you’re not familiar with Sybex/Wiley’s Hour A Day book series, these books take a complicated subject (usually technical) and break it down into lessons that can be accomplished in (surprise, surprise) an hour a day (five workdays a week). I’ve already read (but not consistently worked all the way through, to my chagrin) Web Analytics: An Hour A Day and Search Engine Optimization: An Hour A Day.  One day, perhaps.  (The web analytics one requires about an 8-month commitment to complete.  That’s a little daunting.)

So, what’s this geeky version of the Julie/Julia Project going to look like:  Here’s the schedule:

The Preliminaries: This week, finish reading Part I (The Foundation of Social Media).  Deadline: September 26, 2009

Month 1: Prepare for Social Marketing

• Week 1: Web 2.0 : The Social Web. Deadline: October 3, 2009
• Week 2: The Social Feedback Cycle. Deadline: October 10, 2009
• Week 3: Touchpoint Analysis. Deadline: October 17, 2009
• Week 4: Influence and Measurement. Deadline: October 24, 2009

Month 2: Social Media Channels

• Week 1: Build a Social Media Campaign. Deadline: October 31, 2009
• Week 2: Social Platforms. Deadline: November 7, 2009
• Week 3: Social Content: Multimedia. Deadline: November 14, 2009
• Week 4: Social Content: Reviews, Ratings, and Recommendations. Deadline: November 21, 2009
• Week 5: Social Interactions. Deadline: November 28, 2009

Month 3: Complete Your Plan

• Week 1: Objectives, Metrics, and ROI. Deadline: December 5, 2009
• Week 2: Present Your Social Media Plan. Deadline: December 12, 2009.

Now, why do I want to take on 12 solid weeks of work, finishing just in time for Christmas?  I already use social media some, and I’ve learned a fair bit on my own.  But my efforts are haphazard at best, and they’re certainly not enough to support what I want to do.

So, here’s to a little experiment.  Care to join me?  If so, buy or borrow the book, then go get the worksheets at socialmediahouraday.com (you’ll have to scroll down and click the “Exercise Worksheets” link toward the bottom left of the Facebook page you get redirected to, but you’ll eventually end up here).

Friend and colleague Sylvia Browder, the superwoman (Business Coach! SCORE Counselor! Mom to Five Kids!) who’s Project Director at the Women’s Business Center, Inc., has graciously added me as a Contributor on her blog (http://sylviabrowder.wordpress.com). Once my post goes live, check the comments below for a trackback.

If you own a small business (whether you’re a woman or not), you owe it to yourself to visit her blog regularly or, even better, add her RSS feed to your RSS reader (I use Google Reader) and get a steady stream of great advice from someone who knows her stuff.

(Oh, and I’m just going to say it out loud. I covet her house. Truly. Two words: Gaw. Jus.)

Update: Here’s a link to the post: http://sylviabrowder.wordpress.com/2009/09/20/tapping-the-power-of-story-in-your-marketing/

If a day goes by without me seeing someone misuse “it’s” for “its,” it’s [it is] a good day.

I know, I know, it’s [it is] not logical — every other possessive noun/pronoun has an apostrophe-s on the end.

But English isn’t a logical language.  The rules are specifically formulated to drive you completely freakin’ insane.  Do not let it.  Show English who’s boss.

The contraction “it’s” is short for “it is.” The word “its” is the possessive form of the pronoun “it.”

Got it? Thank you. You can go back to work now.

Once you have this mastered, you can work on these other 27.  That should keep you busy for a while.

… then you should:

http://www.problogger.net

I personally could spend an entire week’s vacation trolling through the archives of this site.  (Yes, my life is, in fact, that sad.)

Great information about becoming a professional blogger (NOT the “make $5,000 your first day on the Internet!” kind), updated constantly, and supplemented by an awesome book (for those who insist on the low-tech coffee house experience).

Yes, it’s an affiliate link. Hey, a girl’s gotta make a living.