Practical Use of Social Media

Readers of this blog know that I am a proponent of social media in business. However candidly there is a great deal of activity and investment in social media that is wasted. You have seen them in action; fancy Facebook pages that are nothing more than a rehash of of the web site or tweets that tell you what the president had for lunch.

Well recently I came across an article that answered the question: How would a pragmatist leverage social media?  The theme of the article was about how to gain insight into your competitors via the social media outlets, brilliant!  With the transparency demanded of participation in these communities, companies freely share a load of information directly with specials on products or fixes to bugs or indirectly via the comments from users about great feature of a product or issues with support.  The article is worth reading:
         http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-gain-competitive-insight-with-social-media/

Well in that vein, I have uncovered a number of publishers of solid information and are interesting to read, let me share a few:

1. The publisher of the article mentioned above; WWW.socialmediaexaminer.com is a great source of information on...drum roll please...Social Media.
2. I like WWW.thesocialcustomer.com also it focuses on social as a tool to support your customer interaction.
3. For something completely different, WWW.gilsmethod.com.  It is a how to blog for the computer user.  The articles are clear an concise, very useful.

Enough for now, Happy Presidents Day.