One of my favorite parts of being a marketer is how naturally social and outgoing the marketing lot tends to be. It’s why we in particular take to social media so easily. There are a lot of mediums out there, but thankfully there are a few great tools to make it all a bit more manageable. Below are a few of my favorites, grouped into categories.

Twitter Management

Hootsuite: the definitive package for managing your corporate and personall Twitter accounts. Users can add, update, and monitor multiple Twitter accounts (and now, even Facebook) from a single browser window. Hootsuite makes managing a corporate Twitter account easy by granting access to as many (or as few) people as you’d like.

Since Twitter is limited to 140 character updates, you have to make the most of each character. Hootsuite features a built-in URL shortener which also tracks clickthroughs for you, no matter where you post them.

Don’t have time to update Twitter all day? No problem. Hootsuite lets you schedule tweets in advance, so you can continually update your feed with things your followers find useful.

In addition to their website, Hootsuite also has a desktop application and a new iPhone app.

Social Media News

Mashable: without a doubt the best source for Social Media news on the Internet. It’s updated constantly by a number of bloggers and is a treasure chest of information.

Mashable covers Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, mobile, and anything else social/techy that you can imagine. It’s easy to navigate and the articles are all written with the modern attention span in mind. Get in, get your info, get out. Awesome.

Digg: the original (and still the best) social networking and news site. The concept is simple - users submit stories, and other users either digg a story up or bury it. The cream rises to the top. Hate mainstream media? Here’s your reprieve.

When I’m looking for content that tends to be cutting edge or obscure, I usually check with Digg. Of course there’s trolls and fanboys, but those are easy enough to avoid.

 Podcasts

Marketing Over Coffee. Yeah, their logo sucks - who cares?? This weekly podcast by Christopher Penn and John Wall is witty, humorous, and full of can’t-miss content for marketers.

Each week they bring you best practices for both B2B and B2C marketers, covering covering everything from SEO/SEM to social media monitoring and marketing. If you’re looking for a place to learn how to make nice mailers this is not it.

These guys are all about metrics and measurements. If you can’t measure the lift, they’re not interested and neither should you be.

 
This Week in Tech. Leo Laporte is an old-school broadcaster with plenty of new-school ideas. He was one of the very first to eschew traditional terrestrial radio and move into podcasting. I believe this show began in 2006, so you know he’s way ahead of the curve.

Each weekly installment is about an hour long and brings me up to speed on the week’s updates in technology, both consumer and enterprise. If you are a marketer you absolutely, positively cannot let technology pass you by. This is a good arrow to have in the quiver.

 These are just a few of my favorites. Got some of your own that you’d like to add? I’d love to see them in the comments.

Twitter remains a popular topic in the mainstream media these days, gaining more and more popularity with public support from celebrities like Oprah and Ashton Kutcher. Most recently it garnered worldwide attention for its role in documenting the uprising in that followed the country’s controversial election.

Some people have even suggested that Twitter can be a useful business tool, but many remain skeptical of its practicality. My experiences tell me that if used properly, it can indeed be a useful tool for business people, and I’ll give you an example of a B2B webinar I recently ran along with some metrics to give you an idea of just how powerful it can be.

Straight to Performance Numbers

I decided to promote this webinar in two ways: traditional email marketing and Twitter. My email marketing plan was fairly straightforward with two targeted email blasts headed to 7,363 contacts in our company’s database, scheduled within three weeks of the event. After two email blasts with a 1.06% clickthrough rate, I had 66 registrants.

Twitter’s turn. I posted a registration link to our corporate Twitter page, which has about 400 followers including our customers and partners, as well as people who are generally interested in Cloud Computing. The link was almost immediately re-tweeted and subsequently read by thousands of Twitter users due to the viral effect. Numbers? 107 additional registrants, nearly double what I got from two separate email blasts.

In doing some analysis on the people that registered via Twitter, I found that they did not previously exist in our Salesforce database, meaning these people were likely hearing about us for the first time. When we actually held the webinar, Twitter registrants accounted for 60% of the attendees. They also had higher GoToWebinar Interest Ratings of 52 vs. the other attendees’ average rating of 46.8. The rating is a statistic built using a proprietary algorithm calculated based on attendance length, attentiveness, and a few other factors.

The case for Twitter use in a B2B marketing environment is clearly enforced by positive numbers, provided that you set appropriate metrics to begin with. Since this is such a new medium, some of the traditional direct marketing principles no longer apply.

How Else Can it Be Used for Business?

How about customer support? After posting the recording of our webinar to Twitter, we had someone reply that our recording wasn’t Mac-friendly. I apologized, mentioning that GoToWebinar’s only output is in Windows Media Format, unplayable on Mac machines. Within just a few minutes, GoToWebinar replied on Twitter to both of us, providing a workaround that made the recording available to anyone, regardless of their operating system.

The idea that Twitter can be used to provide customer service is catching on quickly with many companies. These include salesforce.com, Comcast, Zappos, Sun Microsystems, and many others. All of these companies are using Twitter in much the same way as GoToWebinar – responding to customer issues quickly and without pretense. Salesforce.com even offers a solution that pulls customer tweets right into its CRM application to notify customer service representatives of the need for follow up, further promoting goodwill in the community.

In addition to interacting with customers and prospects, Twitter offers up a wealth of free information from subject matter experts. All you have to do is find them and follow them, and odds are you will learn a great deal about best practices for any number of business disciplines. There are marketers, accountants, salespeople, operations gurus, you name it – and they’re out there.

I find myself following people and companies in all sorts of industries, just because it’s interesting to hear perspectives different than your own, 140 characters at a time. It’s quick and easy to digest, and is absolutely worthwhile as a business tool.