Well my first official speaking gig wrapped last week at Search Engine Strategies, and I had a blast.  Definitely had some nerves up to and during my session titled “Social Media Solutions On A Budget”, but overall, I think it was a success.  Much of what I covered was pulled from many of the blog posts I’ve written over the years here.  Concepts such as using Linked In Groups to drive blog traffic, tools such as Hootsuite, SocialMention.com & Sprout Social all were covered in my presentation.  As much as I’d like to post the presentation here, we’re not allowed as it’s content that is only accessible by those who paid to attend the show.

One of the big takeaways for me from the experience is the need to ensure your presentation is “actionable.  A few of the presenters I observed were great speakers and spoke on solid concepts, but never really left the audience with any actionable takeaways.  When creating my presentation, I continuously asked myself whether what I was sharing could actually be used right away.  Luckily for me, I had some great immediate feedback from those who came up after the presentation saying they appreciated this approach.

Of all the shows I attend, I definitely feel that SES is one of the stronger shows that provides real value by offering quality content, and a variety of tracks to choose from.  If you ever are considering a show to attend to learn and network, you can’t go wrong with SES.  Their next show hits Toronto June 13-15th and then San Francisco August 15th-19th (which I hope to be speaking at again).

I’m definitely looking forward to attending at Search Engine Strategies in New York next week.  It will be my return to a show I attended quite often during my tenure at Microsoft Advertising.  This time around I’ve gotten the folks over at SES to actually put me on stage where I will be speaking on a panel for the Social Media Solutions On A Budget session that I actually pitched and had accepted.  For those of you attending, I would love your support and feedback.  The session will be on Wednesday, March 23rd from 3:45-4:45.

Joining me will be panel moderator Greg Jarboe, President of SEO-PR and Jeffrey Harmon, Chief Marketing Officer for Orabrush.  I had the pleasure of meeting Greg back in my Microsoft days and I look forward to his moderation excellence.  And if you haven’t checked out the Orabrush story, you owe it to yourself to at least check out their back story.  It’s a true testament to the power of social media and the web.

On to New York.  If you’re attending, let me know as I would love to meet as many folks as possible.

Like I mentioned in my earlier post, things couldn’t be better in my new gig at S360.  So good in fact that it’s only taken a little over a month and a half to already need to hire my first team member and I couldn’t be more excited about it.  Today I begin my search for the first piece of many in building out the S360 Marketing & Social Media team.  I’ve always loved mentoring and teaching, and I look forward to finding someone I can work and partner with.  There’s nothing more exciting then having the opportunity to build a team, and this individual will have a great opportunity to be part of something from the ground up.

For the full details of the position and to apply, check out our official job posting: http://seattle.craigslist.org/see/mar/2215923821.html

Good luck to those interested, and stay tuned as I continue to share my adventures of building the S360 offering and team!

Yesterday my family and I went on our yearly trek to the Mill Creek Town Center where we’ve found it to be a great trick or treat location.  It’s a terrific hip/trendy outdoor shopping area, and the crown jewel of the town.  They host great events, and the Halloween celebration is always a hit with the kids.  The local businesses do a great job at dressing up their stores, themselves, and creating a fun, safe atmosphere for kids to trick or treat.  It’s a win-win as the residents get a great option for trick or treating, and local businesses get extra exposure for their business.

That is of course those that actually choose to participate and that’s where the inspiration for this somewhat social media free post comes in.  This year their were literally 30-40% of the businesses that choose NOT to participate in this year’s event.  Nothing.  No candy, no employees, CLOSED.  Excuse me, but ARE YOU KIDDING ME???

Some background first.  Mill Creek Town Center is an expensive place to have a business as is evident in many of them folding throughout the past few years with the tough economy.  If you want to run a business here you better have a great business one way or another.  That or at least deep pockets.

How could a local business not choose to spend a few hundred bucks for some candy, decorations, and have one or two people out there?  That’s thousands of opportunities to expose your business to new customers.  Not to mention a tremendous opportunity to hand out coupons, business cards, anything to promote your business.  I was floored by how so many of these businesses choose not to participate.  These are the same businesses that would probably spend a couple thousand dollars on a magazine or newspaper ad.  Really?

I would have taken it even one step farther.  How’s about integrating social media?  Encourage those walking by to tweet something about your business.  Give something away to those that do.  Or pass out coupons for something with your digital assets plastered all over them.  Get your name out, be memorable, inspire new customers to try you out.  They’re all there anyway!

It was unbelievable to me the utter failure these businesses were committing.  Who knows, maybe they don’t need the business now, but any long term successful business knows not to rest when times are good. 

The sooner the better I say.  There really is no reason to have to be dealing with word documents and pdfs anymore with the rise of Linked In (or even leading jobsites like Monster).  Any HR department with any common sense must certainly see the value in being able to simply get the information they need quickly without having to dig through email attachments.

There is a tremendous amount of value to having your resume be a living and breathing entity.  It gives prospective employees the ease of being able to easily update their career inventory on the fly and have it available to anyone, anytime.  One place to update and easily share with whoever you wish.

Linked In does have a little known feature that allows you to export your Linked In profile as a pdf, so if you do have old school requests, you can actually still send off a pdf version of your resume.  One nice feature I’d like to see Linked In create is to make this feature a bit more robust.  Right now the export is a fairly bland output.  It would be great to have the option to export into a few additional layouts so that the output is a bit more polished.  Something like that would most certainly make using Linked In as your exclusive home to your resume a done deal.

So what say you?  Are you close to making your resume a web only experience?  Or are you still stuffing inboxes with attachments?  And if you are a recruiter or in HR, what will it take to completely move away from the old school methods?

I absolutely love it when I find incredible tools online that help enable your productivity, efficiency & marketability.  They can often be hard to come by, but there are some great ones out there and the following list are the ones that come to mind recently that you may or may not have heard of or used.

1. Search Status Firefox Extension – This is my new favorite plug in.  So simple and unobtrusive, yet highly addicting and very informative.  Quite simply, this plug-in shows you any website is performing in the far right bottom of the Firefox web browser.  Quickly and easily you can see Google Pagerank, Alexa, Compete, and a variety of other data points.  If you are a serious blogger or a digital marketer, it’s a must have.

2. Xmarks – Managing bookmarks can be tedious, but Xmarks is a great little piece of software.  You create an account, and install the software on all your machines, and whalla, you can ensure that your browser bookmarks are synced up across all your computers.  You can also access your bookmarks on their site if you are ever on a public computer.

3. bit.ly Sidebar – URL shortening is all the rave, and bit.ly has certainly put their stake in the ground as the industry leader.  What makes their offering so great is the statistical analysis and easy of use.  Sign up for an account, and make sure you use their bit.ly Sidebar bookmarklet.  It makes sharing extremely easy, and will automatically track all your URL shortening so you can see how much activity results from what you share.

4. SocialMention.com – What a great free tool.  It’s one of the few resources that is free that allows you to monitor keywords across the web.  A great way to test it out is to simply search your name and you can a nice little dashboard of information including measurements of sentiment, passion, reach and a variety of other data points.  It’s certainly not professional grade, but for a free tool, it’s a great starting point for social media/digital marketers.

5. Dropbox – I heart Dropbox.  So easy to use, great UI, and of course free (they do have paid upgrades).  Who can’t use 2GB of cloud storage at there disposal.  There are countless times where I find the perfect situation to be able to drop a file on a desktop folder, and know that I can get to it on one of my other machines.  So good.  The iPhone app is the icing on the cake.

6. Tweetdeck – I know most of those reading will know of Tweetdeck, but I have to add this to my list as I’ve tried practically all of the different Twitter apps, and in my opinion Tweetdeck just seems to work out the best.  Logically everything is laid out well, and it fulfills my needs perfectly.  However when it comes to a mobile Twitter app see #7.

7. Tweetie – Best iPhone Twitter app hands down.  Clean, easy to use, and just works.  I don’t use it for anything heavy, but it’s a perfect mobile Twitter experience anytime I need to post, read or just check in.

8. Tweetadder – I’ve written about Tweetadder before, but it bears repeating.  It’s a great piece of software if you are serious about managing your Twitter account and want to build a strong, relevant following.  I started at 500, and I’m closing in on 30,000 in just 6 months or so of casual use.

9. FriendFeed – Most people of heard of FriendFeed, but not as many use it.  Here’s my #1 reason for you to consider; increasing your blog subscribers.  Of course this only really works if you use Feedburner (which many bloggers do), but my blog subscribers skyrocketed once I started using FriendFeed.