Let one of these social media monitoring tools help you filter out the noise and listen to what people are saying about your brand online.

“It’s about conversations, and the best communicators start as the best listeners.”-Brian Solis, The Social  Media Manifesto. Social media monitoring tools are quickly becoming a lot less of an option and more of an essential tool for both individuals and companies. Conversations are being held in the vast world of media web with little regulation of what is being said, and no longer can we choose to be ignorant of these conversations. On the contrary, we must join them.

Of course, not everyone has the same monitoring needs and as a result there are a variety of different tools available with prices that range from absolutely free of charge to thousands of dollars. A beginner blogger might just want to know who’s sharing his/her blog posts with friends on social networking sites, where on the other hand, a large corporation might need a more extensive service that monitors mainstream news, blogs, forums, social media and more across multiple keywords and filters with analytics and reporting features.

Bottom line, it’s okay that you can’t be everywhere at once because your social monitoring service can be. So take the plunge and sign up for the tool that’s right for you and your business. To help you get started, here are a few different options that Wicked recommends, which are perfect for any budget.

Free Services:

• Google Alerts: Google Alerts is a great place to start and it’s free. It can be used for multiple purposes and is best suited for those who just wish to have a basic monitoring of either one or few online sources. It’s as quick and easy as google search, but conducts more specific searches. By simply filling in a search term, your email address and selecting a type of search from either blogs, news, web, groups or comprehensive search, you can filter your search as narrow as you would like. Google Alerts also gives you the option of receiving emails with the following frequency levels: as-it-comes, once a day or once a week. You can also receive up to 50 results in each email.
• Social Mention: “It’s like Google Alerts but for social media.” Social Mention is also free and sends you email alerts of whatever you are monitoring, whether it is your brand, company, CEO, marketing campaign, developing news story or a competitor. Social Mention goes one step further than Google Alerts and actually gives you data that can be broken or sorted into categories including: likely hood that your search is being mentioned in social media, the ratio of mentions that are positive to the amount that are negative, the percentage of people who talk about your brand and will do so repeatedly, and a measure of the range of influence your brand has.
• Alterian SM2: The free version of SM2 is a social media monitoring tool that was designed specifically for PR and Marketing agencies to measure social media. It monitors a wide range of social media channels like blogs, wikis, micro-blogs, social networks, video/photo sharing sites and real-time alerts and allows you to create up to five profiles that store up to 1,000 search results. Unlike Google Alerts and Social Mention, SM2 retrieves more than just keyword search results and gives you multiple types of analysis and reporting such as comparison charts, reports that identify daily volume, demographics, location and the sentiment of what is being said.

Paid Services listed by price from lowest to highest:

• Trackur: As their tagline states “60-second reputation monitoring. Guaranteed!” Trackur scans millions of web pages including blogs, images, forums, etc. and notifies you of any keywords findings or related interest items. Trackur offers four different levels of service: personal, corporate, enterprise and agency. Each includes an unlimited number of results and an update frequency of every 30 minutes, but they vary greatly in the numer of active searches. Personal accounts runs for $18/month for five active searches at a time along with other tools such as full media monitoring, sentiment tagging and trending charts to name a few. Corporate accounts and Enterprise accounts offer everything that personal accounts have to offer, but with an additional 25 active searches for $88/month, while Enterprise accounts allow you to have 250 active searches for $197/month. The last account type is Agency, which runs for $297/month with unlimited active searches along with a co-branded dashboard, co-branded URL and direct client logins.
• Brands Eye: Brands Eye not only tracks and monitors every online mention with multiple tracking tools, but also provides you with a real-time reputation score for both your brand and your competitors. Duplicate mentions are excluded by the filter created based on pre-determined criteria, and users can rank the mentions in order based on those that require immediate attention to be viewed first. Brands Eye offers three unique packages to meet your needs. Blogger only cost $1 and runs five phrases twice a day, while Small Business cost $95 with 20 phrases that are updated every six hours, and lastly there is the Enterprise package which cost $350 and includes unlimited phrases that are updated every hour.
• Radian6: Radian6 allows you to listen, measure and engage in conversations online. It scans over 100 million sites including mainstream news, blogs, videos, social media, etc. in real time, so that you can be aware of who is talking about your brand and recognize who are the influential people in your industry. Radian6 stands apart from the other monitoring tools in that it offers comprehensive analytics and allows for deep filtering, social media metrics, and data segmentation in order to help make educated decisions. Radian6 starts at $500 per month, per profile for up to 10,000 new monthly results on an unlimited amount of keywords.

Related posts from The Wicked Blog:

1. Wicked PR Launches Social Media Campaign For Krystal Blitz Energy Drink
2. Five Ways Twitter Lists Can Benefit Your Business
3. Wicked Quick In Social Media – 3.27.09

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Wicked designed and developed a new website for professional poker player Justin Bonomo at JustinBonomo.com. Justin and his management team were looking to completely revamp their existing site in order to better reflect who Justin is as person and poker player. Everything from video blogs, interviews, press releases, blog posts, photos, podcasts, Twitter and even musical tastes needed to be incorporated into the build.

On top of that, we always keep an eye on making the content management as simple as possible so the client is not required to contact us to keep their site up to date. From posting photos and videos to blog posts, it needed to be done in a way that was not time-consuming and made maintaining the site easier instead of frustrating. To that end, we used Wordpress as the CMS and managed to find simple, yet elegant, solutions for this multimedia website.

Here are some notes on key parts of the site and how we implemented some of the features you will see at JustinBonomo.com.

HOME

Through several meetings, mock-ups and wireframes, we arrived at a design that that Justin felt suited his personality, then went about adding in content that would give visitors a quick glimpse into his life and career. To accomplish this, we included several elements that would serve as a dashboard for his most recent news items including most recent tweet, video interview and blog posts. To give visitors a glimpse at Justin’s personality, we included the Last.fm widget, which is updated with tracks he listens to on iTunes. As a result, the home page was no longer static like before and is now updated dynamically as he goes about his life and job.

GALLERY

Poker media outlets generate an immense amount of content on a daily basis and as one of the top players on the poker circuit, Justin is often featured in various photos and videos on those sites. We wanted the gallery to be a home for as much of that content as possible, pulling in multimedia from all over the web.

The photo gallery is managed by the excellent NextGen Gallery plugin, which gave us a lot of options for hosting our own images (boosting traffic for image searches) and displaying them gracefully using javascript. The backend of the plugin is very user-friendly and makes it easy to add individual photos and organize them into albums and galleries. The smaller selection on the main gallery page was populated by calling in a single sidebar containing the NextGen widget set to display random photos from the gallery. The full Photo Gallery page displays the entirety of that gallery we created within the plugin.

For videos, we ran into the problem of having content from varied sources needing to be integrated into the page in a manner easy enough for the user to update and universal enough to handle embed codes from multiple sites. Because of this, we couldn’t use a plugin without getting too complex and possibly eliminating some sites with non-standard embed codes. So, we made each video a separate post and used custom fields within those posts that would be pulled into the Wordpress loop and displayed within a shadowbox set at a standard size to accomodate the largest video size likely to be used. For the user, adding videos to the site is as easy as writing a new blog post and pasting the video embed code into a custom field, the rest is handled by the template we created for the page. The full Video Gallery page is just an extension of this with the query set to show all posts from the category.

MEDIA

With the amount of written content put out, not only by poker media, but by Justin himself, we wanted to create a page that could be a hub for all of his media content – a dashboard of all things Justin. Clockwise, the media page displays his most recent articles written for print publications, articles from publications written about him, the latest news (press releases) from his management team, most recent blog posts, radio shows and podcasts and a Twitter feed. Some link directly out to the sites where he was featured and some link through to internal pages. Either way, the process of adding content to this dashboard is as easy for the user as creating a new blog post, putting it in the right (and obviously named) category and filling in some information in the (once again, obviously named) custom fields of the post. All of the links, titles and everything else are handled by the template built for the page.

BLOG

The most popular section of Justin’s old site was his blog, which featured poker strategy, tournament updates, personal updates and more. However, with no permalinks available for each post and no way for people to share the blog posts – without copying and pasting it somewhere else – his content was more or less stuck on his site. With this blog section (and thanks to Wordpress, which makes this very easy) each post has its own link and one-click share tools, giving visitors the ability to tweet, Facebook, Digg, email or bookmark the posts instantly, spreading them across the social web and building Justin’s visibility as a brand while driving traffic and authority to his site.

Well, without getting too horribly technical, that’s about it. The site is up and already drawing in a good amount of traffic. Once the spiders realize that there is now lots more delicious content to devour, we’ll begin to see even more organic traffic heading in. The dynamic nature of the features we set up ensure that no visit is the same as long as the content is kept fresh, which has been made as easy as possible for the user. So, take a look at the site and let us know your thoughts in the comments below, reply to us on Twitter, or drop us a line on our Facebook page.

Related posts from The Wicked Blog:

1. Wicked PR Launches Social Media Campaign For Krystal Blitz Energy Drink
2. Top Wordpress 2.9 Features For Clients and Developers
3. Wicked Quick in Search Engine Marketing – 4.24.09

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Updates About Social Media Week 2010

Today marked the last day of Social Media Week 2010. Conferences took place in Toronto, Sao Paulo, San Francisco, New York City, London and Berlin. And if like us you weren’t able to attend, we’ve provided a couple links to help you catch up on all the news and ideas shared at the program’s various presentations, panel discussions, interactive workshops, seminars and more.

1. Social Media Week Website, Take a look at the blog

2. Social Media Website (SMW) Blog Post About Start of Event

3. The SMW Twitter page

4. Blog Post From NY Conference

5. SmartBlog Updates throughout the week

6. Flickr Albums From All Conferences

Related posts from The Wicked Blog:

1. Wicked Quick in Social Media – 11/2/09
2. Wicked Quick In Social Media – 3.27.09
3. Wicked Quick In Social Media – 4.10.09

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Be sure to run down the complete social media campaign checklist before starting a new project in 2010

While 2009 was the year to get your feet wet with social networking sites, 2010 is the year to perfect your social media campaigns so that they yield the best results possible. So for everyone out there who is already participating, contributing and is part of the community, here are a few items to help plan out your social media campaigns for twenty ten.

Social Media Campaign Checklist:

• Determine your goals/objectives now: Many brands got on social media in the past year solely because they thought they had to but without any real idea of what they were going to do once there and, more importantly, without knowing what they wanted to get out of it.  With consumers looking to engage with brands and brands finding real results on social media, that’s no longer acceptable. Before engaging in social media establish a clear mission. Do you want to generate more online traffic and brand engagement, create buzz around new product/service, gain more newsletter/email sign-ups, increase sales, etc.? Now is the time to decide.
• Determine the media mix and customers/influencers to reach: Research and find out which social media platforms will be the most effective for each specific campaign (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc.) and determine if these channels will reach your target group/demographic. While it’s easy to have a presence on all social media sites, it makes no sense to be there if you don’t plan on being engaged.
• Set a Budget: Assign a budget front to support your campaign for such things as coupons, gift card giveaways and Facebook ad buys.
• Produce engaging content: As you may have heard many times before, content is king! This holds true for two reasons, one being that good content keeps customers and audiences engaged and the second being that the foundation of SEO relies on having a continuous flow of quality content. In turn, generating such content will increase the likelihood that your campaign will connect with its target audience and be a success.
• Determine a measurement strategy: Decide how you want to monitor/track the campaign and how you plan to measure the campaign’s success. For a great read on social media ROI, check out Brian Solis’ article “Maturation of Social Media ROI.” – http://mashable.com/2010/01/26/maturation-social-media-roi/

Related posts from The Wicked Blog:

1. Wicked Quick On Social Media Week 2010
2. Wicked PR Launches Social Media Campaign For Krystal Blitz Energy Drink
3. Wicked Quick In Social Media – 3.27.09

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Brizzly just came out of closed beta and is already one of our favorite Twitter apps.

As one of the most widely used social media networks worldwide and one of Wicked’s personal favorite communication tools, Twitter is a daily part of our lives and can, at times, be difficult to manage without the help of some business friendly twitter clients. So to share some of the key learnings we gained in 2009 from our many trials with various Twitter apps, here are Wicked PR’s Top Five Favorite Twitter Apps.

1. Brizzly – If you are a Twitter and Facebook user, Brizzly is a social media reader that gives you access to both by logging into one simple website. Brizzly can display up to five different twitter accounts at the same time in clear, separate viewing pages. It is easy to use and allows you to do everything that each individual website has to offer but without so many confusing windows and tabs. With in-line photo and video (both load directly into the timeline), the Twitter experience becomes much more streamlined as users can follow conversations without having to click away to view pics or videos. Also aiding the user experience is the “Why?” feature for Twitter’s top trends that load into the Brizzly sidebar. Other Brizzly users supply explanations (at times detailed and humorous) as to why a particular phrase, word, or hashtag is trending at any given moment. On top of that, if you decide someone you are following has a little too much to say about those trending topics, you can quickly “mute” them so their updates do not appear in your stream.
2. Tweetie 2 for iPhone – Tweetie allows you to check your Twitter account directly from your iPhone. Though there are many other applications with essentially the same functions, Tweetie is widely known to be the most efficient one and of course, a Wicked favorite. The newest version of the app – appropriately named Tweetie 2 – has added a lot more functionality to the already popular app, giving image previews on individual tweet screens as well the ability to upload video, geolocate and much more. Wrap it all in a slick, shiny new user interface and you have an iPhone Twitter app that is well worth the $3 price tag.
3. TwitPic – TwitPic is an application that gives users the ability to post and share pictures via Twitter. TwitPic is integrated with most mobile, desktop, and web apps., giving users the ability to send out short URLs to hosted images as part of their Tweets.
4. Seesmic Desktop – Seesmic Desktop, like Brizzly, displays multiple Twitter accounts as well as your facebook account in the same place, but unlike Brizzly they are all layed out in columns across the same viewing page. The number of columns are unlimited and their content is up to your imagination. The Seesmic Desktop is for the multi-taskers who frequently monitor multiple status updates and manage multiple Twitter searches and accounts, making it ideal for an agency like ours to keep their finger on the pulse of conversations happening about clients, new products and trends
5. Boxcar Application for iPhone – The Boxcar application sends a push notification to your iPhone whenever you receive an @ reply or a direct message on Twitter so that you can view and reply in a timely manner. We all know that you can receive emails, text messages and possibly a singing telegram when someone DMs you on Twitter, but that range of notifications has been noticeably absent from the world of @ replies – especially given that most power users will @ reply another user and fully expect an answer as if it were a DM – that’s where Boxcar steps in. Whenever your account receives an @ reply, it pushes a notification to the iPhone which appears as if it were a text message, making it easier and much more efficient to keep track of conversations and participate in them directly.

Yasmine Abdallah is an intern with Wicked PR in Atlanta. She is currently enrolled at Georgia State University majoring in Journalism with a concentration in Public Relations.

Related posts from The Wicked Blog:

1. Seesmic Desktop Twitter Client Improves Twhirl, Replaces TweetDeck
2. The Masters To Twitter Tiger Wood’s Birdies And Eagles
3. Five Ways Twitter Lists Can Benefit Your Business

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To that end, Wordpress 2.9 has hit the shelves and comes packed with several features that make things easier for the client to manage and therefore easier for us to develop. Here are some brief descriptions on the improvements I like the most with links to more in-depth articles where needed…

Images:

1. Native Post Thumbnails – Everyone loves magazine-style thumbnails on their front page or blog/archive pages. Prior to 2.9, using them involved explaining to the client how to upload a picture through the normal method, click the radio button for the thumbnail version of the image, copy the image location URL, scroll down, select the correct Custom Field from the drop-down list and paste in that URL. Now, Wordpress 2.9 comes with an optional feature that you can turn on in your themes to make thumbnail selection much easier to explain and to use.

Using The New Post Thumbnail Feature In WordPress 2.9

2. Image Editing – Making image management just that much easier, there are now crop, rotate, flip, scale and aspect ratio options available all from within the new “Edit Image” screen, which can be reached by clicking “Edit Image” once a picture has been uploaded.

WordPress 2.9 Media Manager and WP Image Editor Preview

Videos:

3. oEmbed Support – Embedding video has never been super difficult in Wordpress, but sometimes having to switch between the HTML and Visual tabs adds a layer of confusion for the client to what can be an already confusing process depending on the complexity of their theme. With oEmbed protocol support, Wordpress now takes the URL of a video and fetches the necessary embed code and displays the video correctly on the page. All the user has to do is put the URL on its own line. There are ways in which parameters can be added by using the shortcode, but for dead simple video embedding it’s just as easy as pasting in a URL.

Wordpress Codex: Embeds

Editing:

4. Undo and Trash – These are both fairly self-explanatory. Undo gives users the option to, you know, undo things in the Wordpress dashboard, like accidentally deleting a comment or approving a spam comment. Trash is now a kind of purgatory for posts, pages and comments. There is a new tab across the top of the edit screens and these three types of content can be moved to trash and then either restored, if you change your mind, or deleted permanently, if you never want to see that content ever again.

How to use Trash feature in Wordpress 2.9 Version

SEO:

5. rel=canonical – The use of Canonical URLs is now native in Wordpress 2.9 for singular pages. So, no need for plugins or template tweaking. Whenever you publish a post or page, it will automatically generate the rel=canonical meta tag in the header of the page.

Explanation as to what Canonical URLs actually are:

Google Webmaster Central Blog: Specify Your Canonical

Users:

6. User Contact Fields: – Wordpress user registration fields have always been rather limited and an odd collection of information. To get around this, I’ve always used the excellent Register Plus plugin to create additional fields and for extra tweaks with the login/register process. In Wordpress 2.9, with a couple of additional lines in functions.php, you can now create/remove user fields as part of the core login process, without a plugin. Makes the whole thing just a little more stable to deal with.

User Contact Fields in WordPress 2.9

Templates:

7. Slug-Based Templates – From a development perspective, this is one of my favorite tweaks as it makes a life a little easier for me and not just for the client. Prior to this, category-specific templates could be created using the ID number of the category (category-<id>.php), which made it a pain to go in and edit these templates. Who remembers the ID number of every category in every Wordpress install? So, I would just toss everything into archive.php and use a collection of if/else statements to style category pages. Now, however, with the ability to use slugs (category-<slug>.php), finding and editing templates is much easier. If I want to create a category archive styled a specific way to display videos, all I have to do is create the template category-video.php and I can find it again easily for tweaks, and the Wordpress template hierarchy takes it from there.

That’s it for now. There’s are a whole lot more Wordpress 2.9 features and enhancements that have been included in this release and as I come across them and decide how useful they are to me, I’ll share them here.

Related posts from The Wicked Blog:

1. Wordpress SEO: Using Category Descriptions on Archive Pages
2. Zappos Map Features Geo-Tagged Purchases In Real Time
3. Wicked PR Launches New Website for Poker Player Justin Bonomo

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Learn to swim before you catch the Wave.

Still don’t completely understand Google Wave and the zillions of things you can do with it? Check out these sites to help gain some clarity:

• For the most comprehensive overview, you could check out the infamous 80-min video made by Google detailing every inch of the application: [Youtube]
• Or, if you don’t quite have an hour and a half to spare, check out this adorable video that highlights Google Wave’s main features. [MinuteBio]
• If you’d rather your instruction manual be in print form, read this blog written by Google itself on the Wave: [The Official Google Blog]
• And to drive home that the Wave is just as confusing as is it is revolutionary, point your attention to the blog devoted entirely to understanding the service: [What is Google Wave?]
• And as always, Mashable breaks it down, covering the basics, explaining its features, as well as how to get started: [Mashable]
• Check Out Google Wave for yourself (assuming you have an invite) here.

—Melinda is an intern with Wicked PR in Atlanta. She recently graduated from The University of Tennessee with a degree in journalism and electronic media. Follow her on Twitter @WickedMel7.

Related posts from The Wicked Blog:

1. PitchEngine Responds to Google News Spammers
2. Wicked Quick In Design – 4.3.09
3. Wicked Quick In Social Media – 4.10.09

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Twitter Lists could be big for your business.

No doubt, Twitter is here to stay. The social media site is fast becoming as necessary as having a Web page in helping to promote products, people and brands online. As the site expands, many easy-to-use features, apps and tools are popping up to help you stay connected to clients, competitors and the like. One such tool is Twitter’s own Twitter Lists.

This brand new Twitter feature enables you to organize the people and companies you follow by categories. For example, you can create a new list, add the users (it doesn’t matter if you follow them or not), and publish the list to your profile for others to see or for your own private use. The goal is to help you manage your direct messages, conversations and interactions more efficiently while also sharing and suggesting groups of people with others.

So how can Twitter Lists work for your organization? Well, here are five ways for starters:

1. Better organizing means better efficiency – Obviously the reason why Twitter Lists were created in the first place was to better keep tabs on followers. With your company’s Twitter account, you can organize followers by employees, clients, location, etc., and with one click you can see a tweet stream that includes everyone in that particular group. This helps eliminate the clutter if you follow a lot of people and makes your “Twitter time” more efficient.

2. Keep an eye on competition - Create a private list of competitors to keep abreast of what they’re saying and doing without them knowing that you’re listening in.

3. Keep tabs of influencers – Every industry has its influencers, from popular bloggers and trade journalists to the so-called experts. Twitter Lists allows you to group them together to easily keep track of what they’re saying and possible opportunities for exposure.

4. Create cross-pollination – Every list your organization is on presents an opportunity for others to learn about your establishment. It’s social networking at its most basic. Along these lines, the more “categories” you or your brand fits in, the more opportunities for you to appear in a variety of Twitter Lists. For example, our client Krystal (@krystalist) is on Twitter Lists for everything from “food” to “competitive eating” to “guilty pleasures.” This type of cross-pollination means more people are likely to follow Krystal based on their particular interests.

5. Use Twitter Lists For Contesting And/Or Promotions – You can create temporary Twitter Lists as part of a contest or promotion. Issue a challenge to your followers or have people nominate themselves or others based on their loyalty or enthusiasm for your brand or a particular product. If they make “the list,” they receive a gift card, coupon or simply earn bragging rights and exposure.

For more on creating, managing, finding and following Twitter Lists, check out this article.

—Melinda is an intern with Wicked PR in Atlanta. She recently graduated from The University of Tennessee with a degree in journalism and electronic media. Follow her on Twitter @WickedMel7.

Related posts from The Wicked Blog:

1. The Masters To Twitter Tiger Wood’s Birdies And Eagles
2. Tweeting While Driving Proves To Be Risky Business
3. Seesmic Desktop Twitter Client Improves Twhirl, Replaces TweetDeck

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What will the future hold for social media?

And now a quick look at what experts think the future will bring to social media:

• Harvard pulls out its crystal ball and predicts six social media trends of 2010. [Harvard Business]
• Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur goes ultra lo-fi and introduces 30 ideas likely to be on Twitter’s forecast. [Mashable]
• The powers that be believe social network powerhouses will be more willing to join forces. Allegedly, Facebook and Myspace are already conspiring to take over the world wide web. [CNET.com]
• As social media networks look to consolidate, they may find newer ways to zero in on their audience. Buddy Media went as far as to create a social media network specifically for advertising and PR agencies to track their clients more easily. [PR Web]

Related posts from The Wicked Blog:

1. Wicked Quick In Social Media – 3.27.09
2. Wicked Quick in Social Media – 06.3.09
3. Wicked Quick In Social Media – 4.10.09

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Our friend Jason Calacanis (@jason) had the always entertaining and passionate Gary Vaynerchuck (@garyvee) on his “This Week in Startups” show last Friday. Gary was there to talk about his new book Crush It and took calls and answered tweets from TWIST viewers looking for his insight on entrepreneurship.

If you’re not familiar with Gary, he’s the man behind the uber-popular video blog Wine Library TV, which reaches more than 80,000 viewers a day, and is an expert at leveraging social media tools like Twitter and Facebook to build his personal brand and business.

Here are some quick quotable takeaways from Gary during the show:

“People aren’t betting on their sweat equity enough.”

“The way to really better yourself is not by financial risk, but by your effort and your skill sets and your hardwork.”

“The biggest thing that separates people is hunger.”

Check out the full show above.

Related posts from The Wicked Blog:

1. Wicked Quick On Social Media Week 2010

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