Social media marketing has been changing the way business utilize communication technology, combining different mindsets with flexible rules and non-existent standards. Nearly every company entering the “social media fray” is trying to create something new,in preparation for this I have collected a list of sites and authors that have some incredible resources for making strategic plans.

I urge every client at here at 123SocialMedia to educate themselves and listen to the conversation. It is far more effective to spend some educational time so that you know enough to ask the right questions. It is also far more effective to understand what types of like-minded campaigns have succeeded or failed in the social media space (while your thought may sound original, it may have lived and died a hundred times already.)

• The first author: Peter Kim, has an amazing resource of over 300 brand examples to look at. He has the most comprehensive collection I have found to date (I highly suggest you visit!) In addition to that piece, Peter Kim also has an article at Mashable covering the 22 steps to Social Media Marketing. One of the most valuable pieces of that article is his mention of the username check tool (one of my favorite free services) that tells you if a username is available on 75 different networking sites.

• 110 Ways Retailers are using Social Media is a good breakdown by Linda Bustos provides a platform breakdown of businesses using Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, and other applications.

There are many other resources for finding specific examples on platforms: here are a few that I have found useful.

What is all the Twitter about?

SocialBrandIndex has a useful breakdown of brands using Twitter.

Want to share your images?

Geoff Northcott covers brands using Flickr.

Want to understand Facebook?

Inside Facebook talks about improved SEO with Brand Pages.

Are there any other platforms and campaigns that you are specifically interested in hearing about? If so, leave a comment and I will point you in the right direction.

The team at 123 Social Media wants to reach out and say “Thanks!” for a warm welcome. In one-hundred days since our launch we have grown to July being at almost 10,000 unique visitors thanks to our readers from around the world and a lot of effort on our team.

As we have grown, a good portion of our business readers ask a dominant question:
“What makes 123 Social Media different than an search engine optimization company?”

A lot of things make us different, but the main difference is quality information and an expert perspective. Unlike a lot of “SEO firms” with ugly landing pages and bad sales pitches that scare you away… our site’s roughly 10,000 visitors in July were here for an average of five minutes and forty-three seconds. That equates to roughly 57,000 hours of readership in July.

Needless to say, that helped our brand just a little bit.

We aim at giving quality content revolving around the very important topic of business social media. We try to let you peek inside our brains and share the information as we receive it (or sometimes even create it!) That often means looking at strategic ideas and asking the big questions, from ethical media consulting to social media fundamentals, to tactical analysis of corporate social media and social media training.

Some highlights that happened to us in our launch period was receiving honorable mention from two different social media groups:

The Biglist is maintained by TopRank’s Lee Odden. It is a list of 400 blogs that cover search engine optimization, social media, public relations, and online promotion (Thankfully we are all 4!) Two fundamental requirements of being on the BigList: Your blog must cover search marketing and it must post weekly at a bare minimum. Other considerations include, blog design, usability, writing style and quality. Thanks to Lee for putting us on the list. We promise to keep things interesting.

We also made it into the Top 20 of Alltop for the Social Media category. “You can think of an Alltop site as a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet. To be clear, Alltop sites are starting points—they are not destinations per se. The bottom line is that Alltop is trying to enhance your online reading by both displaying stories from the sites that you’re already visiting and helping you discover sites that you didn’t know existed.

The one strange evolution of this site and our readers is a slightly interesting one- our business readers like to pick up the phone, send us a regular e-mail, or shake our hands at real world networking events… and our online marketing peers have conversations with us all over the net.

That makes a few articles here that missed some great conversation, so we hope that you join in and begin chatting with us a little more. For our less savvy users, we are encouraging you to take a look at joining our MyBlogLog community (join here) and signing up for a Gravatar account (see the images near our comments and the sidebar, that could be you!)

One of our biggest goals here at 123 Social Media is helping business decision makers understand that you do not need to use every Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, or Yelp out there… you just need to have a strategic understanding of how those services interact with different business needs and how you can tactically use them to reach your goals.

If you just like keeping “all those fancy things” out of your head, you can also subscribe to our RSS feed that currently has about 400 readers in it.

We do we go from here?

We have some hefty goals to produce more quality content, participate in the conversation affecting millions of professionals and thousands of industries, and to grow as a resource for businesses looking to understand social media.

Our navigation will be influenced by a great shifting tide occurring around us, however we promise to keep a positive outlook, ethical professionalism, and our problem solving mindset finely tuned.

Social Media in Plain English