Last week I earned many of your eyeballs by sharing how I scored a 6-figure gig while using Twitter.

Twitter is definitely a viable method for communicating to prospects, clients, and business fans but, like many new social platforms, it can be overwhelming. Not just how it works, but also how to utilize all the handy applications that are available to enhance your experience and value gained with it.

Twitter is a microblog that enables real-time messaging to the world via your computer or mobile device. The only rule—your message must be under 140 characters.

Start slow and simple. Add apps as you get comfortable with it.

Here’s a rundown on some of my favorite Twitter tools and how I use them. If you have discovered a Twitter tool that really rocks, please share it in a comment on the Oddpodz blog, so others can learn about it.

Grade your Twitter profile. Try Twitter grader at http://Twitter.grader.com/Learn to see if your tweet power, authority, and reach are working for you. This grader not only gives you a score, but tells you how to amp things up.

Organize and manage your tweets Better. Check out TweetDeck, http://tweetdeck.com/beta/ This cool tool is your ... read more >>

One of the more difficult aspects of Facebook up until yesterday was the search capability on the site. Yesterday was a busy day at Facebook as the “FaceFeed” acquisition was put in motion .Under the radar of sorts was this announcement about improvements made in the search capabilities that helps heavy Facebook users considerably and, in particular, marketers.

Let’s be honest here. Facebook is like every other social networking / media / engineering marketing site in that it promotes communication and a kind of online hippy mentality. It’s all peace, love, everyone getting along and basically knowing way too much about each other. Well folks, let’s remind ourselves of one thing about the lovable hippies of the 60’s. They went on to become major league capitalists (the ones that could at least feed themselves like Jerry Rubin) and while Facebook may always talk about the user experience what they are most interested in their financial experience. At the end of the day it’s a business and who can fault them? The search capabilities help the business of Facebook even more and may help them hit those lofty revenue numbers.

For now though let’s imagine that the reason at the top of ... read more >>

We have seen this borne out in other forward-thinking companies we’ve worked with - former employers and clients - who have been willing to take risks and fundamentally change the way they do business. As profiled in the Sales 2.0 book,  Oracle captured “low-end” and international customers early its history - and ahead of the company’s competition.  Syneron established a first-mover advantage by daring to sell to doctors and their office staffs differently -using the phone rather than expensive vacation junkets to fill the pipeline with qualified sales opportunities as well as serve customers with dedicated ... read more >>

Ok class. What’s the most important word in the title of this post? What’s that? I can’t hear you? The word is predicted. We then turn to our training in the world of market research and look at the source, which in this case is the Mobile Marketing Association, and then draw our conclusions. Please note that I am by no means saying that this study that MediaPost brings us isn’t correct. I hope it is. We need good news and if there is a segment of new media marketing that is poised to take off it’s mobile (well, at least we have been hearing that for the past few years so it has to happen at some point right?)

So the MMA is taking heart that despite overall marketing spend being off 7% for the same period (which is another prediction so it could be higher or lower in the end when all the rubble is cleared away) there is a 26% bump in mobile marketing spend anticipated. It goes on to say

While mobile is bucking the downward spending trend resulting from the recession, the emerging medium is still only a small fraction of total marketing budgets, at 1.8%. The MMA projects that mobile ad spending will grow from $1.7 billion this year to $2.16 billion in 2010

Of the brands and .. ... read more >>