The only social media advice you need

I keep thinking about How To Be Interesting, a 2006 blog post I read a few months ago. Russell Davies captured the essence of my social media strategy, what social media means to me, and why it's been so successful for me and others. If anyone ever asks me for advice in this arena, I am going to quote Davies:

...the core skill of any future creative business person will be 'being interesting'. People will employ and want to work with (and want to be with) interesting people.

Social media is a big deal because it helps you do the two things Davies recommends to cultivate that skill of "being interesting":

The way to be interesting is to be interested. You’ve got to find what’s interesting in everything, you’ve got to be good at noticing things, you’ve got to be good at listening. If you find people (and things) interesting, they’ll find you interesting. 

Interesting people are good at sharing. You can’t be interested in someone who won’t tell you anything. Being good at sharing is not the same as talking and talking and talking. It means you share your ideas, you let people play with them and you’re good at talking about them without having to talk about yourself.

It's not rocket science: social media helps you find more interesting things (such as when I found this article via Hacker News) and share them (like I'm doing with this post).

Links and slides for Social Media for Everybody

Last night I gave the Social Media for Everybody talk at SKYLOFTS, an amazingly nice space in Highlandtown.  As promised, below are the slides and the links I discussed. It was definitely a firehose of information! Thanks to all who attended.

Social Media for Everybody

View more presentations from Mike Subelsky.

Tools and References

http://bmorefiber.com
http://blogger.com
http://wordpress.com
http://campaignmonitor.com
http://ping.fm
http://tubemogul.com
http://postling.com
http://followcost.com
http://pleaserobme.com
http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/facebook
http://reader.google.com
http://readitlaterlist.com/
http://www.tweetdeck.com/
http://cotweet.com
http://www.google.com/alerts
http://feedburner.google.com/
http://www.google.com/analytics/
http://getsatisfaction.com/
http://bit.ly
http://news.ycombinator.com/
http://whoshouldifollow.com/
http://mrtweet.com/
http://www.meetup.com/
http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages
http://www.linkedin.com/
http://friendfeed.com/
http://www.ustream.tv/
http://docs.google.com/
http://groups.google.com/

Further Reading and Watching

http://www.technotheory.com/how-to-use-social-media-guide/
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fans.php
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com
http://www.technotheory.com/2009/01/6-concrete-lessons-learned-in-online-relationship-building-as-presented-to-the-gbtc/
http://www.brandinteractivism.com/2010/05/creating-online-grassroots-movements-lessons-from-the-million-mom-march-10-years-later.html

Turning complainers into champions presentation by Josh Baer:

• http://www.youtube.com/user/joshuabaer#p/u/3/iclb18ohDeo
• http://www.youtube.com/user/joshuabaer#p/u/3/_LoFhIcQ4JU
• http://www.youtube.com/user/joshuabaer#p/u/2/VSX8VVsbHkc    

http://blog.asmartbear.com/how-i-got-6000-rss-subscribers-in-12-months.html
http://amzn.to/bmMN2i
http://twitter.com/chris_ashworth

Social media for everyone!

I'll be giving a super personal, super passionate talk about social media at the SKYLOFT artistic community in Highlandtown on May 25th. I was invited by two new interesting veteran's groups that have formed in Baltimore, the Veteran Artist Program, of which I am a board member, and The Sixth Branch.

These guys have big, creative plans, so my talk will be about how to get the word out while being a responsible community member (e.g. this is not about marketing per se).  What I plan to talk about should be useful to people from all walks of life (entrepreneurs, artists, employees, nonprofit types, etc).

You can see more details or RSVP here.

SocialDevCampEast recap

SocialDevCampEast on Saturday was a blast.  Lots of talk about building up the "Amtrak corridor" running from DC to Boston as one unified, tech-ified region.  The talks people gave were interesting (I even got to do one on my experiences with Amazon Web Services), but for me the most valuable experiences took place in between sessions and at the after-party held at Brewer's Art.  

I met several cool DC, MD, and VA entrepreneurs which was really invigorating.  I found out about some new blogs that I need to be reading, including eastcoastblogging.com, written by the creator of the newly-launched MyDropBin.com. 

I also saw first-hand the value of Twitter, which I'm very late to the party on.  I don't know that many people in my own circle who were using it, but after seeing how it was fostering the collaboration among people in the conference environment, I'm sold, especially if you have something client-side that checks tweets for you (my friend Brian Lyles aka Smarticus recommended Twitterific, which works great).  So you can now catch me @subelsky.

Thanks to the sponsors and organizers for a great event; I'll be at the next one for sure.