Jason Calacanis On How To Get PR For Your Startup: Fire Your PR Company

Social media blog by Peter Kim - found as a recommendation from Jeremiah Owyang

Welcome to TwitterPacks, where the community recommends fellow Twitter users by topic of interest or geographical area.

People use different words when they search for your products online. Use these ‘keywords’ in your website copy and people will find your site when they search.

No matter what business you are in, Wordtracker will tell you the words people use when they search - and how popular each word is.

With a Wordtracker subscription, you will be able to:

* Optimize your website content by using the most popular keywords for your product and services
* Generate thousands of relevant keywords to improve your organic and PPC search campaigns
* Research online markets, find niche opportunities and exploit them before your competitors

In short, your search engine ranking will soar, you’ll get more visits to your website and more people will buy your products.

One of the more significant Web 2.0 trends in business this year has been the advent of the Web-based customer community, where groups of like-minded individuals focus around a brand or a set of product and services come together and interact online. Far from the cynical marketing ploy that it can sometimes seem, customer communities often sprout up on the initiative of passionate customers.

You’ve told the boss that you’re going to implement social media stuff for your organization, and in your mind, you’ve decided that means an account on Twitter and a blog. Maybe there’s a bit more to it than that. For instance, what are your goals? Are you there to show customers and prospective new customers that you care? Are you there to solve customer issues? Are you building awareness and attempting new forms of digital marketing? Knowing this up front makes a world of difference.

In the mean time, here are some things you might consider for when it comes time to implement. They range from ideas for starting out, things to augment your efforts with, writing ideas, next steps, and metrics. You’re welcome to share this with others. Please link back to [chrisbrogan.com] and especially this post if you use it.

Keep it in the Box -
Working with our chairman, Barry Libert, over the last two years, one of the many important lessons he’s taught me is to “keep it in a box.” It’s taken me a while to internalize this important lesson but as they say, it takes hearing things 11 times to really “hear them.” With me, it may have taken 111 but the message has finally started to sink in. Essentially what Barry has instilled in me is how important it is to keep what I do on a daily basis:

* Closely aligned with our business goals
* Prescriptive vs. descriptive so that others can take action
* Easy to understand (could I explain what I do to my grandfather?)

Still on Hold? Twitter Can Rescue You From Customer Service Line Waits
Companies Looking to Microblogging Site to Get Through to Frustrated Customers

Using color to give punch to sites.

Broadcast and print media and the services that support the creation and distribution of information are not dead and Social Media is not going to get indicted for holding the smoking gun.

These powerful, influential, and age-old industries are however, undergoing some of their most radical transformations and metamorphoses in order to adapt to the elusive and rapidly shifting information landscape.

Did you notice that the “Web 2.0” term was outdated? One can say that after months (years?) of overselling the “2.0”” stuff, it begins to fade. Now, modern marketers talks about “Social Media“. Because with always newer services, always more sophisticated concepts, copycat, mashups of mashups… it really begins to be confusing. This is why it was important to divide this big “ratatouille 2.0” into smaller meta-concepts to ease the understanding (Enterprise 2.0, Social Shopping, Social Medias…).

But have we taken the time to define what social media is? This is my point: to provide you with a definition and give an overview of what it relates to.

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Local URLs for San Francisco

The best presentation on Social Media ever!

What The F**K is Social Media?

SlideRocket is a web application that provides everything you need to design professional quality presentations, manage and share libraries of slides and assets, and to deliver presentations in person or remotely over the web.

With many individuals finding great success with social media (and as an aside, a basic understanding of search engine optimization), they immediately consider themselves social media marketers and consultants (as well as seasoned SEOs) and offer to sell their promotional services. What skills, though, do successful social media marketers have that put these individuals above the average (or addicted) social media user, and better yet, above the traditional marketer? I asked several social media consultants, bloggers, marketers, search engine optimizers, and social media addicts about what they considered to be essential skills and characteristics of the most efficient and results-driven social media consultants. In the many paragraphs that follow, learn from many of the experts and hear what they consider success when using social media to engage with consumers about products and services.

New social networks launch everyday, most start with the same basic features. Bloggers have wordpress, mephisto and other open source solutions. Lovd offers a free open source social network platform.

Built with Ruby on Rails, Lovd is a social networking solution that has everything you need to build your community.

Good article about Twitter and it’s many variations:

Whether you love it, hate it, or don’t get it, Twitter is a thing of fascination on so many levels. It’s supposed to be a one-trick pony, designed for the restless, the narcissists, and the stalkers (pick one) to answer one simple question: “what are you doing?”

MagCloud enables you to publish your own magazines. All you have to do is upload a PDF and we’ll take care of the rest: printing, mailing, subscription management, and more.

We like helping entrepreneurs succeed. We provide advice with Hacks and introductions with Recommended.

Our team includes Nivi, Naval Ravikant, and Kartik Agaram. Previously, we’ve founded Epinions and helped start companies backed by Sequoia, Benchmark, and Kleiner Perkins. We’ve also invested another $20M in about 12 companies.

Submit your own photo & make your own (de)motivational poster!

As a designer, it’s not always possible to take the time and generate your own textures for all of your graphics. Thankfully, there are tons of convenient stock textures that others have freely contributed to the design community! We’ve gathered 99 of our favorites in this gigantic list!

Branding one’s self in an online environment built on entropy and go-baby-go is difficult at best, and impossible if you forget to take your happy pills. To that end, I’ve come up with a quick list of 100 things you might do to help with these efforts. Feel free to add your ideas to the comments section.
If you like this one, please don’t hesitate to stumble, blog, digg, bookmark, and otherwise promote the hell out of this. That’s another tactic, by the way. : )

Find News, Videos, photos & blog posts about anything you type in — What a great news aggregator!

Headlines & typography does in unique & beautiful ways.

May was a busy month, we have been watching great news, articles, tutorials, scripts, tips and lot of inspiration for web designers popping up everyday so we thought it would be a great idea to wrap all those resources in one package where you can check to fuel your energy for creativity.

Have your browser understand what you are blogging about and suggest pictures, links, articles and tags to make your posts more vibrant. We are making blogging fun again.