The Caffeinated Blog

Whole Lotta Link Love Friday, April 23

It's been a while since my last edition of Whole Lotta Link Love, so it's high time I brought it back and shared some love with all of you. Are you ready for some link lovin'? Here are some of my favorite posts this week:

1. Mitch Arnowitz of Tuvel Communications (where I'm Social Media & Community Outreach Manager) talks about how tweetups can be used by trade show exhibitors to drive booth traffic and help build relationships with current and prospective customers. 
2. Jesse Stanchak offers some pointers on pitching to influencers over at the SmartBlog on Social Media.
3. I fully believe basic HTML is a skill every online marketer should have (no, I'm not talking about mad skillz, just knowledge of the low-level basics). HubSpot goes through some basic HTML for marketers here - read it, learn it and bookmark it for later reference, people.
4. Chris Rauschnot, who was a panelist recently at the 2010 NAB Show discussing "Twitter and the Entertainment Industry", offers his advice for defining a corporate social media policy in an NAB Show Blog guest post.
5. Social media marketing ain't easy. If done right, it takes TIME and EFFORT; but somehow this has escaped many marketers or business owners who think it's a "set it and forget it" marketing tactic. This is not the case, as Jay Baer explains at the Convince & Convert blog.

Have a great weekend, and I'll leave you with the latest episode of "Foursquare Cops" from the bright (but clearly crazy) minds at HubSpot. Enjoy!

7 Social Media Tools I'm Using RIGHT NOW

For the last 2 months, I've been joyfully toiling away, working on a couple of social media and blogger outreach projects for large conferences. I'd like to quickly share with you the tools I use on a daily basis that have been immeasurably useful to me on these projects (and I'm sure will continue to be on future projects as well). They help me track, monitor, communicate, engage and organize social media and outreach campaigns.

Google Alerts: where would I be without my precious Google Alerts. I set up RSS feeds of each of my alerts in Google Reader and organize them by project. Simple and incredibly useful.

SocialMention Alerts: like Google Alerts, except I can track mentions across a variety of social media outlets (including blogs, microblogs, forums and videos). All alerts are sent directly to me via email (alas, no RSS option yet).

Hootsuite: My new favorite Twitter social networking client. I can set up tabs for Twitter, Facebook (pages and profiles) and LinkedIn and post to all 3 at one time, plus I can set up multiple columns within a tab for keyword searches.

Ow.ly: Used in conjunction with Hootsuite, I'm able to track clicks on URLs shortened using Ow.ly.

Futuretweets: I use this to pre-schedule tweets for sessions and other big happenings at the conferences I'm working on, allowing me to focus on monitoring the conversations going on and engaging attendees. The best part about Futuretweets? You can schedule down to the second.

Twapper Keeper: Most conferences have hashtags, whether they're official or not (people just kinda create them if they don't already exist). Twapper Keeper is a great tool for aggregating all those tweets tagged with a specific hashtag and exporting them for later use (like for reporting).

Tweetwally: Create your own Tweetwall and follow tweets from a specific account on your own screen, or use their nifty "View for Projection" feature to display your Tweetwall on a large projection screen for an audience. Tweets update automatically in real time.