Dan Zarilla calls himself a Social Media Scientist because he spends his time documenting what is working and why in the realm of what often is what he calls “Unicorns and Rainbows” about embracing your clients by engaging with them and reciprocity and transparency and lots of other terms that sound good, are hard to argue with, but are not methodology based or able to be tested. Here is a video he did from a recent talk at Harvard.

The Science of Social Media from HubSpot on Vimeo.

I was just thinking about Social Media and community and how I have met some of my best friends from mornings at our neighborhood coffee shop. It used to be the joke around the office that if our client load was low, I should go out for coffee! Social media works in much the same way, but it gives me a chance to have conversations with people that I would never run across in my day to day life. Now, I have the ability to interact with people who share my interests wherever they are, in our virtual coffee shop, by means of following their blogs and Twitter conversations. [Read more...]

I use an RSS Feed with a Feed Reader as an easy way to follow people’s blogs, magazines and news on-line.  You can check for updates to your favorite websites using their RSS feeds, without having to visit each site individually. To get started, find information onl-line that you want to follow; sources who you like what they are doing and want to read on a regular basis. Here is how it works.

1. Choose a RSS program

   To use RSS, you will need to use a RSS Aggregator, a single program that gathers information from all your favorite sites. If you use a lot of different computers during your day, a web-based RSS aggregator is a good choice. I use Google Reader, which puts the feeds from the websites I follow onto my own Google Reader page, accessible from anywhere with an internet connection. [Read more...]