I write blog on my Wordpress site, which then can automatically sent a Tweet out for the new blog. Then I login to Ping.fm and send a micro-blog talking about the blog and the link to it.( I shorten 90% of the hyperlinks I use – if you haven’t setup a free account at http://bit.ly ). With that I can then further monitor where my social media traffic is coming from and how many clicks per post, what countries are reading it,etc.

I then usually hit the web and surf sites that are related and I add comments, quotes from the blog and a link to the whole blog. (at minimum 25 comments per blog)

if the content is longer I will distribute it as an article to the many free article site repositories. if it can’t be any article then I will work on a short Press Release which then can be distributed online via 1-2 free PR distribution sites (if you have budget – I would use the PRweb.com service for top notch press release that will increase your SEO standing)

lastly – I would also look at the top forums within the niche your working on and start posts and respond via honest value. Just make sure your signature line, has your website URLs and now include your social profiles. (there is a great plugin for Chrome that does this amazing sig-line with social profile icons – it’s called WiseStamp – it’s free and when added to your Chrome browser you can manage custom sig-lines when you use gmail or google business apps email solutions.

There you go.  piece of cake.

Donovan

We are always looking for The Secret to our problems.  That one thing that will make it easier to accomplish our goals.  We search through blogs, read countless books and ask our friends how they did X, Y, Z.  But somehow we don’t really get any closer to the Success we want.

We can read the most in-depth how-to blog posts, study the bestselling personal development and business books, and we can seek wisdom from the people that have accomplished goals similar to our own.  Consuming information is great, but it alone won’t bring you success.

So what is The Secret to becoming Successful in life?!?!?!

Sorry if this disappointments you, but the answer is not all that interesting or secretive.  You already know it, but have probably tried to ignore it.

The Secret to Success is Hard work, Perseverance and Persistence.

Yep, that’s it really.  If you work hard, persevere through adversity and always remain persistent in your quest, you can accomplish anything you want.  By the way, this is good news for you.  This means your Success in your career, business and/or life depends on you!  Not somebody else, only you.

You see, with these three qualities continuously at play throughout your life you will pick up the necessary intricacies along the way.  Hard work, perseverance and persistence slowly substitute for all the planning you do in the form of reading and learning from others’ experiences.  What then ends up happening is that through the inherent action involved with hard work, perseverance and persistence you figure out what you don’t know and are better able to seek out the information that will help the most.

You start to learn through experience.  Experiences that are unique to you and your life.

Through trial and error you learn new skills that get you closer to your goals.  Each new experience, each success or failure, is a learning experience far more valuable than any blog post, that inches you closer to Success.

So the key to Success, is action.  Simply action.

Not learning through the knowledge of others, but from the knowledge you accumulate through continuedAction.  But it all starts with hard work, perseverance and persistence.  These three qualities ensure continued action and will guide you to whatever you want.

Do More, Plan Less, Succeed.

In the last decade of the 20th century, Michael Stelzner was a successful copywriter specializing in generating leads using white papers. He was known among freelance writers who were also interested in learning how to write effective lead-generating white papers. Marketers followed him to learn how to capture names and contact information to fill up their sales pipelines.

In 2005, Michael started a blog called Writing White Papers. He used the blog to build an email list of about 25,000 subscribers. Michael was writing for companies like Microsoft, FedEx, Motorola, and Dow Jones. He decided to teach people how to write with the same level of efficiency.

“I started doing teleclasses, where people called a phone number and basically pay $39 bucks for an hour of training over the phone,” Michael said. “Those went pretty well and then I got a crazy idea, about two and a half years ago to do these virtual summits.”

Michael held the Copywriting Success Summit. The world’s leading copywriters all gave presentations on how to improve their copywriting skills. This Summit was followed by the White-Paper Success Summit. Then Michael nose dived into the social web and held Social Media Success Summit 2009. Gary Vaynerchuk gave the keynote presentation.

“It was the first virtual conference of any significance,” Michael contended. “Seven hundred people came to it, and it was completely online.”

Brian Clark, from CopyBlogger; Darren Rowse, author of Problogger, Chris Garrett, co-author of ProBlogger the Book, and other marketing thought leaders gave presentations on how major social media campaigns are formulated and executed. Based on this event’s success, Michael conceived the idea of launching a blog covering social media. He contacted Liz Strauss, author of Successful Bloggers, and Brian Clark to communicate his idea and get some feedback.

“I partnered with some key strategic people; and they were Mari Smith, who is the Queen of Facebook; Chris Garrett, who had co-authored ProBlogger the book; and Denise Wakeman, from the blogsquad,” Michael explained. “They were what I call my firestarters because they helped me start some fires in some circles to get some attention to me.”

Along with Jason Falls, who blogs on Social Media Explorer, and Casey Hibbard, author of Stories that Sell, Michael composed a team of writers who composed guest posts on Social Media Examiner. A proportion of each of these writers’ followings visited Social Media Examiner after its launch on October 12, 2009. Shortly after the launch, Michael spoke at Blog World Expo where he interviewed 16 social media marketing thought leaders including Chris Brogan, and Scott Monty from Ford. Michael released these videos over 9 months slowly.

“We had 13,000 people visit the website; in the first two weeks actually,” Michael said. “By the 2nd month we had 25,000 visit the website.”

Michael’s objective was to publish a long magazine-style article every weekday. He wanted to deliver 20 articles a month like a real print magazine. He even called Social Media Examiner an online magazine, as opposed to a blog.

“Our editorial cycle is long, and we’re like a real magazine in that regard,” Michael said. “We have editorial calendars, and stuff is planned out 30 to 45 days out.”

By the end of the October 2009, Technorati ranked Social Media Examiner as one of the top small business blogs in the world. By January 2010, Social Media Examiner had 10,000 email subscribers, and 55,000 different people visited the site that month. By February 2010, Technorati ranked Social Media Examiner as one of the top business blogs on the planet. Today the site generates 300,000 pageviews a month; Michael had to install two new servers just host all that traffic. Adage ranks it as one of the top 25 marketing blogs in the world. And their Facebook Fan page has over 11,500 fans.

Michael claims that the key to building a community of this size in 9 months is capturing email addresses. Social Media Examiner has many components in place that encourage people to sign up for their newsletter. The subscription form offers a free Twitter tutorial video. They have been able to grow an email list of over 30,000 subscribers.

“We deliver an email into the inbox of our subscribers every single day with the first paragraph of our articles,” Michael revealed. “We get between 30 to 40% open rates every single day to 30,000 people.”

Their main source of capturing email address is a pop over form that hovers over the screen for first-time visitors. There is also a subscription form on the right sidebar. In all emails there is a suggestion to refer a friend to join the email list. The email suggesting a subscription to a friend reads, “Someone referred this to you. Click here to subscribe.” Their Facebook fan page also has a video inviting visitors to subscribe.

Michael also attributes much of the site’s success to its Facebook fan page. Mari Smith, author of Facebook Marketing:. An Hour a Day, has been instrumental in helping Social Media Examiner grow its fan base. Invitations to join the Facebook fan page were broadcasted to the email list. Social Media Examiner attained 1,000 fans almost overnight. There are also many components that allow people to join their Facebook fan page, such as a Friendpile social plugin that shows all of a visitor’s Facebook friends that like Social Media Examiner.

“And the keyword was, ‘Join,’” Michael said. “We didn’t say, ‘Follow us;’ we said, ‘Join.’”

Social Media Examiner’s Facebook editorial guide involves breaking news as opposed to writing features on the flagship website. Amy Porterfield, Cindy King, and Michael Stelzner manage the Facebook page. They make it a rule to reply to every comment. On Friday they invite experts to spend an hour with them on Facebook. Fans are invited to post questions on Facebook.

As an example of the Social Media Examiner page’s influence, Facebook once announced that they weren’t allowing organizations to develop custom landing tabs unless they had a minimum of 10,000 fans. Social Media Examiner’s fans protested, and within 24 hours, Facebook administration changed their policy to allow pages with less than 10,000 fans to develop custom landing tabs.

Social Media Examiner will also be promoting the Facebook Success Summit 2010 using Facebook. They will invite people through the event tab on their Facebook page. They will be inviting people to attend free webinars showing how businesses are using Facebook successfully. During the webinars attendees are allowed to comment on the event tab, so their comments can populate their Facebook news feeds and promote the event to their friends. The webinars will have a link that reads, “Sponsored by Facebook Success Summit,” directing users to the Facebook Summit landing page. A contest will be held for free tickets. Such campaigns will be promoted through email and Twitter broadcasts.

These same type of tactics were employed promoting Social Media Examiner’s last event, Social Media Success Summit 2010. Over 2,500 people were in attendance paying between $300 to $500 a ticket. The event generated almost $900,000. Michael also attributes this success to the ultra-rich content that is delivered on Social Media Examiner. He figures that if people get such great information for free, they are going to eagerly want to see what they could learn if they pay for a conference.

“Every single article that comes to Social Media Examiner goes through four editors before it goes live,” Michael said. “Step one, it goes to our associate editor; then it comes to me, I’m the executive editor, then it goes to a copy editor who is a professional copy editor that ensures that the language is perfect; and then it goes to our managing editor, and then it goes live; so it goes through four different quality assurance processes before it goes live; and a lot of articles get rejected because they just don’t meet the standard.”

1. PRLog.org –

2. BigNews.biz –

3. PR-Inside.com –

4. 24-7pressrelease.com –

5. Onlineprnews.com –

6. ClickPress.com –

7. PR-USA.net –

8. OpenPR.com –

9. PowerHomeBiz.com –

10. SBWire.com –

11. Live-PR.com –

12. free-press-release-center.info –

13. NewsWireToday.com –

14. TheOpenPress.com –

15. USPRWire.com –

Everyone and their dog is trying to rank on Google! Well, It seems like the “magic” number is to be ranked better than 100,000 in the world, so that’s what everyone wants. So how can a bazillion marketers, plus all the other sites out there all rank in the top 100,000?

The obvious answer… they can’t. So that means you have to be ahead of the game, get a leg up on the competition (now that I think about it, maybe I shouldn’t share this post with you…haha). If you’re just writing posts, you are going to be left in the dust because others are doing so much more!

The very first thing you abosolutely need to know about blogging is that you need to use a self hosted WordPress blog. I’m going to share my top 10 favorite blogging tricks to get traffic and leads! Here they are, in no particular order:

1. Install the Onlywire plug-in and submit all your blog posts to social media bookmarks, your readers will be able to use this button as well.

2. Put up a video with you introducing them to your blog and say thanks for visiting, this is what you’re going to get out of my blog.

3. Don’t pitch with every blog post, post content that will actually benefit others.

4. Insert a visible opt-in form that appears on every page. My intro video also invites them to opt-in and tell them what they’ll get if they do.

5. Put the Retweet and Facebook share plug-ins on your posts. The more you create a social buzz with your content, the more Google looks at it.

6. You personally can share your new blog posts on Twitter and Facebook

7. Make a video about your post on Youtube and link it back to your blog.

8. Use an article submitter to blast out your post to hundreds of article directories. The more “hooks” you have out there the more people are going to be “caught.”

9. Make sure you have a keyword in mind and have that keyword in the title, description, tags, body, and anchor text (the text that you click on in a link)

10. Make a Squidoo and a Hubpage with links back to your original post on your blog.

If you do all of these things, I guarantee that your blog will get a big boost in traffic and therefore your Alexa ranking. It still takes time for your blog to start ranking, so BE PATIENT! I’ve had my blog up for almost three months, and the ranking is really starting to take off because I’ve been fairly (not completely) consistent with doing the stuff above. Now my blog posts are showing up on Google! It’s exciting and it’s fun seeing the results.

I also use what is called tribes to share my blog posts. With a tribe, when you post your content the idea is that everyone else in the tribe shares it and you share their content that you posted. The main one I use is called The Unified Tribe and then the four that I use on Facebook is MLM Power Tribe, MLM Global Mastermind Tribe, MLM Magic Tribe, and MLM Alphas Tribe. So get out there and start getting your blog to rank! Just don’t beat me ; ).

UNIVERSAL BUSINESS LISTINGS:

1. Google Maps
2. Yahoo! Local
3. Bing Local
4. SuperPages
5. Yelp
6. Merchant Circle
7. Acxiom
8. ALK-Pilot
9. AllPages
10. AnyWho
11. AOL Local
12. Areaconnect
13. Areaconnect Canada
14. AskCity
15. AssistGuide
16. BeanPool
17. BigBook
18. Blackberry/RIM
19. Canoe Inc. (aka Quebecor) – Canadian
20. Citysearch
21. Collarity  – any idea where on this site?
22. Comcast Local
23. Deep Data
24. DensoAutoNav
25. DexKnows
26. DigiWalker
27. Disney  – anyone have a link for this?
28. Earthlink Local
29. eLocalListing
30. getFave
31. Electronic Directories
32. Go2
33. HelloMetro
34. iaf.net
35. iBegin
36. Idearc (aka infoUSA)
37. infoNXX
38. InfoSpace
39. InfoUSA (aka Idearc)
40. JVC GPS
41. Insider Pages
42. kgb_USA SEE infonXX
43. Kudzu
44. LiveDeal
45. Local.com
46. LocalMatters
47. Loqal
48. Lowrance (aka Navico)
49. LSSI-Volt
50. Menu Networks
51. Mobio Networks
52. OneCallNow – anyone know how they use listings?
53. Onstar
54. OpenList Local
55. Quebecor (aka canoe inc.)
56. Search Bug
57. Search Initiatives
58. Spock – anyone know how this People Search uses
59. SwitchBoard.com
60. TeleAtlas
61. TeleMap
62. TellMe
63. TomTom
64. Topix
65. US City.net
66. V-Enable
67. viaMichelin
68. Vindigo
69. WhitePages  – anyone know how they use business listings?
70. YP.com
71. YellowBook
72. Yellow Bot
73. YellowPages
74. Yellow Page City
75. Zenrin (Phones & GPS devices)
76. Zingy – Any idea where data is on this site?

By Casey Hibbard
Published May 13, 2010

Picturesque Lake Arrowhead, just 90 miles east of Los Angeles, has long been a peaceful refuge for celebrities, film executives and families. More than 120 movie studios have filmed here and the area hosts several big-draw events every year.

Yet the lake community does NOT have a rock-star budget.

With a small percentage of county tax dollars, the Lake Arrowhead Communities Chamber of Commerce must support two visitor centers, multiple events and promotion for the area.

The community has long turned to print advertising to keep visitors coming. But everything changed in 2009.

Small businesses were folding and sponsors were pulling back support of major events.

“Toward the end of 2008, I realized that I would have no discretionary money for advertising in 2009,” said Leslie Saint McLellan, director of marketing and tourism. “Our county grant money would only allow us to continue on with our events and operate our visitor centers. I was just dumbfounded. What are we going to do? How are we going to manage?”

McLellan had heard of Twitter and Facebook, but the part-time marketing director just hadn’t found the time to look into them yet.

“I knew this was something I had to know, but this was the kick I needed,” she said.

With 2009 about to start, McLellan jumped head-first into researching social media and soon posted her first tweet. Now a year later, the community has completely replaced print advertising with social media and closed out 2009 with more lodge bookings than the year before.

Small Budget? You Can Still Compete

An unincorporated part of San Bernardino County, Lake Arrowhead receives a small grant each year based on county tax revenue—$133,000 in 2009. Nearby Big Bear Lake has a budget of over $1 million.

The Lake Arrowhead Communities Chamber runs lean, with McLellan working just 10 hours per week. Yet it must compete with everything else the region offers.

“While Lake Arrowhead has always been a tourist destination, it was very difficult for us to compete with the beach and the desert and everything else there is in Southern California,” she said.

In her position for nearly 20 years, McLellan recognized the value of the web in tourism marketing early on.

“In 1994 I convinced our board of directors that we needed a website and we ended up embracing destination marketing via the Internet in its early stages. All of a sudden we were able to compete much better with other areas that had substantial marketing budgets.”

Social media was the next frontier. McLellan started by opening Twitter and Facebook accounts. Though daunting, she jumped in, reading and experimenting with tweets and status updates.

When she lost her assistant due to budget cuts early in the year, she found an enthusiastic college student majoring in marketing in Los Angeles to research social media tools. He discovered HootSuite and TweetDeck to make social media simpler for McLellan.

With HootSuite, a Twitter client, McLellan consolidates tweeting to a few minutes first thing in the morning by pre-scheduling all tweets for different times during the day.

With analytics in HootSuite, she knows how many people clicked on links and where they are. When she learned that half of her click-throughs come from Europe, she started scheduling tweets to run during their daytime.

On TweetDeck, she catches all references to Lake Arrowhead and hashtag mentions. Her favorite tweeters (including @smexaminer) go into their own column for easy following.

One Weekend—15,000 Tweets

During the summer, thousands head up to Lake Arrowhead for Southern California’s largest free concert series. The Lake Arrowhead Summer Concert Series features more than 30 concerts from May to September.

Last summer, McLellan put Twitter to the test during the concerts. The emcee asked the audience to tweet about the concerts right there using a hashtag. After the busy July 4^th weekend, she was astonished to track on TweetDeck over 15,000 tweets mentioning the concerts—just from one weekend.

Even more impressive, Lake Arrowhead didn’t have anywhere close to 15,000 followers. Today, followers number about 700—much higher than last summer. Concert-goers tweeted about the event and were retweeted. Moreover, the community’s residents and regulars tweet and retweet devotedly.

“On Thursday of each week, we started tweeting about the concerts coming up that weekend,” she said. “It’s almost like we have an extra little army of people out there with second homeowners and concert-goers who talk about Lake Arrowhead and that gets our name out. Somebody will pick up something about Lake Arrowhead somewhere and it just grows and grows.”

She’s also impressed by the longevity of a tweet. Early on, they used hashtags for everything. A hashtag for the annual spring Lake Arrowhead Film Festival “was a saving grace.”

“For about a month after the event, it kept on living through the hashtag,” she said. “Before [Twitter], the day after, you’re done.”

Knowing that, this year they plan a contest with prizes for the most quality tweets with the film festival hashtag (#laff). In letters to filmmakers, she let all participating film folks know about the contest, encouraging them to join in.

Lake Arrowhead Film Festival Promo Trailer from David Dibble on Vimeo.

Lake Arrowhead uses Facebook to post videos and photos for events.

Bookings Grow Without Ad Budget

A year ago, newbie social media marketer McLellan would never have expected to be teaching others how to use these new tools. She has even started her own blog—Just A Small Town Girl —to help others who are marketing with little or no budget.

The impact of social media surprised her, and the Chamber board. In 2009, the Chamber spent $500 on advertising, down from $15,000 the year before. Twitter and Facebook alone filled the gap.

“Social media was like winning the lottery,” she said. “It took the place of seven months of advertising in a national magazine as well as print media in general for us.”

Most importantly, 2009 topped the year before, and 2010 is already ahead of this time last year.

“I’m in total awe that this actually worked, when I think of the fall of 2008 when we were panicked. I have to give the board of directors credit for saying, ‘Go ahead and try this.’ It was such a leap of faith but it certainly paid off for us.”

There are many social networking tools designed to streamline the management of your online profiles.  I have listed a few of  my favorites.  Here are some of  the most innovative and popular social networking tools available today to help get you started in your quest for social media domination (if that’s even possible)…

Streamlining Social Media Activity

Ping.fm

I’ve used Ping.fm for quite awhile now and am very happy with this little app’s performance. Ping.fm is a free service that allows you to ping a message to any of your social media profiles across the web, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Plurk and many more – Over 40 social networking sites are currently supported. This saves you a ton of time trying to post similar content to several social networking sites individually. Another useful feature of Ping.fm is that it automatically shortens urls for easier posting to Twitter.
FriendFeed

FriendFeed is one of the most popular social networking aggregators on the Internet. It’s a lightweight, easy to use application that allows you to share content with your friends from various social networking sites, including Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and more – Currently over 50 sites are supported. FriendFeed will also easily integrate with blogs or websites, and there are both private and public settings available.
MySocial 24×7

As the so-called “perfect companion for FriendFeed”, MySocial 24×7 is a lightweight sidebar extension for Firefox that works perfectly with FriendFeed. This extension keeps you updated about what’s going on with your friends or “everyone” at Twitter, MySpace, YouTube and more. All of your passwords are stored in the Firefox Password Manager, so replying to messages or posting your own is extremely fast and efficient. The advantage of this app is that it’s relatively non-intrusive, so you can continue to browse the Internet while the MySocial 24×7 sidebar continues to update you in real-time.

Atomkeep

Atomkeep is a small tech company that provides an easy solution for managing multiple accounts at various social networking sites, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and more. It’s also a great service if you’re looking to manage multiple career search websites, such as Jobster, Monster, Job.com. You get a ton of functionality in one easy to use interface, which is sure to save you time and resources on managing each social site individually. One thing worth noting is that Atomkeep is currently not accepting new members, although their website says that they’ll be accepting new registrations as capacity allows.
Shareaholic

Shareaholic is another lightweight Firefox add-on that allows you to easily share content on any of over 60 social networking sites quickly and easily. It also offers other advanced features, such as real-time trending, and it’s totally customizable. One of its greatest features – other than speeding up your social networking – is that it helps to declutter your web browser by eliminating the need for social media buttons. Shareaholic won the Mozilla Foundation Grand Prize Award based on user experiences, innovation, technical correctness, and use of open standards – sounds like a winner to me.
EventBox

Event Box allows Mac users the ability to run multiple social services at once. Currently in its beta phase, EventBox only offers support for eight social networking sites, including Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, Reddit and more – More networks are sure to follow as EventBox progresses. The advantage of using EventBox for social networking is its beautiful and easy to use interface based on Leopard’s CoreAnimation technology, which is a flexible and intuitive design. EventBox also allows you to communicate via messaging services without having to disrupt your browser window.
Minggl

Minggl is a very cool and interesting application that integrates with IE, Firefox, and Firefox for Mac to streamline social networking across six popular services (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, LinkedIN, and Digg) – Minggl claims support for more services in the near future. This lightweight application provides a surprisingly powerful punch when it comes to speeding up your social networking. It stores all of your login info for each social site and allows you to send status updates or tweets directly from Minggl’s interface within seconds without having to visit the social site directly. You can also update as many social sites as you’d like at one time. I expect this tool to become increasingly popular in the next year or two because of its incredibly simple interface and useful functionality.
8Hands

8Hands is a free desktop application similar to Minggl in many ways, but it offers support for 10 social sites with more to come very soon. It also offers mobile support for staying on top of your favorite social websites while you’re on-the-go. Some of the most notable features of this innovative social networking tool include instant real-time notifications of new messages/friend requests/videos/feeds/comments/and more, drag and drop functionality, statistics, and easy access to all of the supported social networks from one interface.
Social Networking Profile Organization

Retaggr

Retaggr will benefit anyone with more than a couple online social profiles with its seamless integration with many of the most popular social networking sites today. This service is a bit different than other social network management tools, because Retaggr allows you to create a digital profile card – sort of like a business card – which displays all of your social networking, blogging, and other personal information for others to get in touch with you or follow you on any number of social networking sites. Your profile card gets its own personalized web address to make it easier to keep all of your social networking information in one place. This is one of the best tools available for bringing together all of your online profiles into one easy to manage page. See a sample profile card here.

DandyID

DandyID is very similar to Retaggr in that it offers a set of tools for managing your online identity more efficiently. It supports over 300 services, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and more. There’s also a WordPress plugin available called DandyID Services, which makes integrating DandyID functionality into your Wordpress blog easier than ever. DandyID launched in April, 2008 and it seems to be growing in popularity very quickly, so expect to hear a lot more about this service in the coming months.
GizaPage

GizaPage is yet another tool for organizing all of your social networking profiles into one personalized url (yourname.gizapage.com). This service works by setting up an individual tab for each social site at your unique url, such as having one tab for Twitter, one for Facebook, and so on. GizaPage also offers a robust statistics package and a digital profile card similar to Retaggr’s.
Twitter Apps

TwitterFeed

TwitterFeed is a great tool for blog owners looking to market their latest blog posts on Twitter. Instead of having to manually post to Twitter each time you update your blog, TwitterFeed automatically posts an update to your Twitter account with a link to your new blog post. TwitterFeed is one of the easiest Twitter apps to use, because once you’re signed up and have your automatic Twitter message configured, it’s a completely hands-off service. It also keeps track of real-time stats for added functionality.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck (currently in Beta) works seamlessly with Twitter, and provides you with advanced statistics, local trends, Facebook integration, easy messaging, url shortening and more. Plus you can easily manage multiple Twitter accounts using TweetDeck – for example – If you have a personal account and a separate Twitter account for your website.
Social Media Web Browsers

Flock

Flock is a social web browser powered by Mozilla, and it works by integrating a powerful set of tools for easy cross-social networking without having to visit each individual social media website. It allows the user to drag and drop text/images for posting at any social networking site, have real-time Facebook or Twitter chats with friends via a sidebar within the browser, post directly to your blog, manage RSS feeds, easily integrate web mail and much more. Flock also features a healthy bag of add-ons available, much like Firefox, for full customization of the look and functionality of your browser. This is one of the most powerful free social networking tools out there right now.
Kinoma Play

Billed as the world’s first mobile social media browser, Kinoma Play connects you with all of the most popular social networking sites – such as YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, Picassa, Twitter and more – while you’re on-the-go. It allows you to submit content to multiple social networking sites quickly and easily via any Windows Mobile phone.

As excited as you may be with cross-publishing Facebook apps, Seesmic, Ping.fm, Posterous, TweetDeck, TubeMogul, Blip.TV, FriendFeed and the latest, Google Buzz — which automatically move what we say from one social media network to another — until these tools become as good at listening as they are at talking, they also bring with them a degree of risk that warrants acknowledgment.

When I demo all these services among my clients, people get excited. Their first reaction is that they’ll be able to leverage these tools to syndicate their messages everywhere. After the eyes glaze over with just how many places there are to communicate on the social web, at first blush these tools appear to be a magic bullet for social media engagement.

The problem is, these tools are made for talking. And that’s just what they do. As just like that Nancy Sinatra song, if you’re not careful, one of these days these tools are going to walk all over you.

Some, like Seesmic and TweetDeck, are starting to include some degree of listening. But for the most part, these tools make it easy to talk, or perhaps I should say scream, for the highest mountain through as many canyons as possible.

Syndication tools will continue to improve, but as it stands, there’s no one tool that allows you to syndicate what you say and get everything you need to hear back, without significant blind spots. In fact, I’ve often thought they can may actually work against you by serving as social media ear plugs, or creating duplicate post feedback, as we FriendFeed and Twitter App our way into our very own echo chambers.

If you rely on these services to display your content on multiple social media networks automatically, it is much more likely you’ll forget to actually log into Linkedin or Facebook in a reasonable amount of time to see if you get questions that deserve a reply. If you have, and don’t respond, you’re using social media as a publishing platform, instead of building stronger relationships with people and organizations.

As long as you remember to listen, these tools do offer new efficiencies. But remember, you can’t have conversations if you don’t listen to what people have to say. And as it stands now, social media syndication tools need to learn to listen as well as they talk.

Flickr Photo Album for WordPress

The Flickr Photo Album for WordPress will allow you to pull in your Flickr photosets and display them as albums on your WordPress site. There is a pretty simple template provided, but you can customize the templates to match the look and feel of your own blog .

The plugin will also add a new Flickr icon to your WordPress edit screen. Clicking the icon will bring up your Flickr photo stream which allows you to easily insert your Flickr photos into your blog posts with just a couple clicks. You can either have your inserted photos link back to your WordPress Flickr photo album or directly to your Flickr.com photo page.

Flickr Photo Album for WordPress is pretty easy to install and use. However, making a custom photo album may require the help of your web designer. Most bloggers either use the supplied template or just link to their photo albums on Flickr. From a branding stand point, it’s better to keep the album on your blog and create a new template that matches your blog’s look and feel.

Having my images hosted on flickr has many advantages. I save on bandwidth and storage cost. Why use up my bandwidth when I can use Flickr’s? Backing up my blog to Amazon S3 with the Automatic WordPress backup plugin cost less money as well since I don’t have to backup the images. Flickr has their own backup system to make sure your images are safe and secured.

Flickr is extremely economical. You are allowed to upload up to 200 images for free. Go above that and you’ll have to upgrade to a Pro account which cost $24.95 a year ($47.99 for two years). The Pro account allows you to upload an unlimited number of images.