Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Why are credit cards, televisions, books, and iPods shaped the same way? They all form a “golden rectangle”–a phenomenon we’ve recognized for millennia. But why are we so obsessed with these rectangles in our media? In 2009, Duke University researchers discovered a practical explanation. Humans can process information inside these rectangles, like text in a paragraph, very efficiently. In this case, we’re drawn to a lighter cognitive load. We like books because they actually look easy to read.

It’s just one of many examples given by Lance Hosey from The New York Times in a recent column. Through a series of research vignettes, he presents beautiful design as an evolutionary imperative beyond this caveman ideal of needing sharper rocks to better kill mastodons. I especially enjoyed this explanation of why we may love Jackson Pollock.:

Certain patterns also have universal appeal. Natural fractals–irregular, self-similar geometry–occur virtually everywhere in nature: in coastlines and riverways, in snowflakes and leaf veins, even in our own lungs. In recent years, physicists have found that people invariably prefer a certain mathematical density of fractals–not too thick, not too sparse. The theory is that this particular pattern echoes the shapes of trees, specifically the acacia, on the African savanna, the place stored in our genetic memory from the cradle of the human race. To paraphrase one biologist, beauty is in the genes of the beholder–home is where the genome is.

LIFE magazine named Jackson Pollock “the greatest living painter in the United States” in 1949, when he was creating canvases now known to conform to the optimal fractal density (about 1.3 on a scale of 1 to 2 from void to solid). Could Pollock’s late paintings result from his lifelong effort to excavate an image buried in all of our brains?

We respond so dramatically to this pattern that it can reduce stress levels by as much as 60 percent–just by being in our field of vision.

But the most wonderfully complex thing about all the implications behind Hosey’s piece is that there’s no one driving scientific principle behind it all–other than that within many so-called beautiful designs, there’s some hidden positive correlate for the human experience. So all we’re left learning, really, is that our hands and eyes are drawn to these pretty objects for the same reason our tongues are drawn to sweets and fats. At some level, our taste actually influences our survival.

If you’re like millions of Americans looking for a job right now, it might be time to take a step back and evaluate your job-search tactics. There are some common mistakes that can make you your own worst enemy when trying to get your foot in the door of a new employer. To give your employment search some performance enhancement, make sure to follow these tips.

1. Early Bird Gets the Worm

The sooner you get your job application in, the better luck you will have at getting your resume seen. If you are slow to reply to a job listing, you likely will lose your shot at be considered, so make sure to stay up-to-date on new listings as they arise.

2. Get a Jump-Start

Even better than being one of the first to apply for an open position is seeking one out before it is posted. Research the companies you are interested in working for and reach out to see if any openings are on the horizon. Interact with the company on LinkedIn, join the same local trade organizations the company attends and find out where their staff members might be speaking publicly. Consider volunteering at events the company may be involved with to start to get to know the staff and familiarize yourself with the company culture.

3. Tailor Your Information

Applying for jobs can often be a numbers game, so once you have narrowed down the best fits for you, make sure you customize your resume and cover letter for each position you apply for. Though you will want to be one of the first to apply, don’t be in such a rush that you automatically eliminate yourself by not indicating how your skills are a match for a specific position and how you meet that particular’s company’s requirements. Not showing you are a fit for that specific job will surely end your chances of being considered.

4. Follow Up

Though it may feel like you are sending your information into a large black abyss at times, there are people on the other end. It’s perfectly acceptable — even preferred — to send a follow-up email if you don’t get a response within a couple of days. This is when you confirm that the interviewer received your information, giving you a chance to reiterate your interest in the job. But, if a listing specifically states “no phone calls or emails,” abide by that request or you may end your chances. Once you have landed the interview, absolutely follow up with your interviewers through a thank-you note, again expressing your interest in the company and the job.

If you feel like your job search is at a standstill, be sure to reevaluate how you are going about it. After all, we all could use a little performance enhancement from time to time.

Wow that is small! Hope it works!

Two tiny satellites billed as the world’s smallest space telescopes will launch into orbit Monday (Feb. 25) on a mission to study the brightest stars in the night sky.

The Bright Target Explorer (BRITE) nanosatellites look like little cubes and will blast off atop an Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) at 7:20 a.m. EST (1220 GMT) on Monday from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India.

While tiny nanosatellites have launched into space before, they have been mainly used to study Earth or test new spaceflight technologies. But the BRITE satellites will be the first spacecraft of their small stature to peer into the cosmos, their builders say.

The diminutive spacecraft are less than 8 inches wide and weigh less than 15.5 pounds.

The diminutive spacecraft are less than 8 inches wide and weigh less than 15.5 pounds. Once in orbit, they are expected to observe the brightest stars (from Earth’s perspective), including those that make up well-known constellations such as Orion, the Hunter.

“BRITE is expected to demonstrate that nanosatellites are now capable of performance that was once thought impossible for such small spacecraft,” said Cordell Grant, manager of satellite systems for the Space Flight Laboratory at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS), where the satellites were designed.

One of the BRITE satellites launching Monday was designed and built at the Space Flight Laboratory. The other was designed by the center, but assembled in Austria, university officials said in a statement. They are two of seven satellites set to blast off with India’s rocket launch on Monday.

The nanosatellites can only fit small telescopes, so they won’t be capturing amazing high-resolution images of the cosmos, Grant explained in the statement. But they will be able to observe and record changes in a star’s brightness over time. Such observations could help scientists find spots on the star, an orbiting planet or secondary star, or “starquakes” caused by oscillations within the star itself.

The nanosatellites can monitor their target stars from any orbit — they just need to be above the atmosphere to avoid the twinkling, or scintillating effect, that overwhelms stars’ relatively small changes in brightness, researchers said.

The two BRITE satellites launching Monday are designed to be the first wave of a planned constellation of six space telescopes to study the brightest stars in the night sky, UTIAS officials said. In all, the six-spacecraft constellation will include two Austrian nanosatellites, a pair from Poland and a pair provided by Canada.

By keeping the satellites small, they can be built faster and at a lower cost than their larger counterparts, and be launched as a piggyback payload on rockets carrying larger spacecraft, UTIAS officials said.

“A nanosatellite can take anywhere from six months to a few years to develop and test, but we typically aim for two years or less,” Grant said.

Photos courtesy Defense Media Network

What if Grammys were given out based on popularity on social media? This infographic examines which nominees are dominating Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.

Going into Sunday’s 55th Grammy Awards, for example, Carly Rae Jepsen’s viral hit “Call Me Maybe” has the most YouTube views out of fellow Song of the Year contenders: Fun’s “We Are Young,” Ed Sheeran’s “The A Team,” Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger” and Miguel’s “Adorn.” The Grammy Awards will air Feb. 10 at 8 p.m. ET on CBS.

Meanwhile, Taylor Swift has the most subscribers, beating out every nominee in the Best New Artist, Song of the Year, Record of the Year and Album of the Year categories, according to the data from creative marketing agency Activ8Social. Swift also has the largest Facebook fanbase, by a long shot, versus her competition for Record of the Year.

Inforgraphic courtesy of Activ8Social

Topics: 55th Grammy Awards, Entertainment, Facebook, Full Width, grammys, instagram, Music, Social Media, Television, Twitter, YouTube

Guest post by Ian Greenleigh, author of The Social Media Side Door (Fall 2013) and social strategist with Bazaarvoice. Follow him on Twitter @be3d

Products were once contained by physical ownership and access. To experience a product, you had to buy it or try it. Brands extended beyond the idea of physical products into other types of consumer exposure to companies. Non-customers have always had access to brands outside of the ownership capacity, through advertising, word of mouth, and any other manifestation of a company that didn’t require ownership of their product. But this brand experience lacked depth—you may have seen an ad for something, but without having consumed it as a product, it would be hard to argue that you really experienced it in any meaningful way.

The web and social punched a million holes through this idea. Experience has streamed through these holes and spilled out beyond physical ownership and captive audiences. People want to experience products and brands on their terms, in new ways, and meaningful experiences aren’t reliant anymore on that historically necessary condition: product ownership. Relationships between people and brands have gone from binary and transactional to complex, with a kind of depth once reserved for human relationships. Exhibit A of this shift is the Millennial generation, for which brand preference is the top online personal identifier—more important, in this respect, than religion and ethnicity.

We’re seeing a convergence of identities, brands, and products, and a decentralization and diffusion of the brand experience. It’s everywhere. Consumers watch unboxing videos of other people opening things. They listen to total strangers who know a lot, instead of just their friends and family, who may not. They stand in line for hours to get things first. They use brick-and-mortar stores as their personal showrooms, whether the retailers like it or not. They customize their shoes (and even their candy) online. In all these ways and more, they are interacting with products and brands without—or before—physically owning them, and often, without having paid a penny.

Many brands have embraced this to varying degrees. Consumers, they have realized, are their best marketers. They are the people best equipped to transmit the brand experience to other consumers so that it resonates, instead of being ignored, distrusted, and forgotten. These brands have taken steps to create more things worth experiencing and sharing. They move at the speed of social (or as close as they can get to it), putting out videos, tweeting, blogging, updating their Facebook pages more than a few times a day. Consumers are rewarding the good stuff by passing it along, and in doing so, they pass bits of the brand along with it. Companies and consumers are talking to each other beyond the call centers and points of sale for the first time in history. Real, authentic one-to-one and one-to-many communication is making relationships less transactional, and more like real relationships.

Suddenly, an idea that had applied mostly to commodities and luxury items applies to everyone. That idea? The experience you build around your product is often more important than the physical product itself. People are increasingly buying physical things due to the experiences they associate with them because the experiences that surround—but aren’t contingent on—product ownership are more frequent, accessible, and fulfilling. Consumers can get value, for example, out of reading Kate Spade’s excellent Behind the Curtain blog whether or not they’re shopping for or own any Kate Spade handbags.

Physical ownership no longer has a monopoly on meaningful experience. It’s an extension of that experience, the highest and best version of a brand. The act of purchase is being transformed from one of the only ways to access a product or meaningful brand experience, to the step consumers take to unlock the full or best experience.

Every brand is now in the experience business.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

Facebook launched Developers Live Wednesday, a new way for developers to stay on top of everything Facebook.

An extension of Facebook’s existing developer’s site, Facebook says the new live portion of the site will be a “central place to learn about the latest tools and to get access to product manager and engineers who created them.”

The curated video channel will include live as well as recorded broadcasts, often with an interactive element for developers to get questions answered by Facebook staff. Videos on growing your mobile app and Graph Search have already been added to the site’s video library.

The first live event, What Developers Need to Know in 2013, will be held Feb. 19 at 10:30 a.m. PST/1:30 p.m. EST. Hosted by Doug Purdy, Facebook’s director of platform product, mobile, web, and gaming developers will hear first hand what the social network believes they should be thinking about this year. He will also answer developer’s questions.

Developers can RSVP for the event on Facebook.

Photo by Mashable, Emily Price

Facebook hit a billion users! Twitter is the new digital water cooler! Youtube is the future of TV! Ok, you get it right? Social media is transformative. So what? Every business that thinks about customer engagement through a technological lens will miss the very thing that will keep them in business for the long-term—the impact of technology on society and behavior and how it opens up new touch points and changes expectations as a result.

Depending on your business, you may or may not already have someone dedicated to your social media strategy. Whether it is aligning with your current business objectives and priorities is a different article. The focus for our time together right now is on how you will compete for the future of attention, wherever attention is focused. All signs at the moment point to mobile as the future of engagement and commerce as smartphones and tablets become the lens for how consumers see the digital and virtual worlds.

At the end of 2011, the U.S. alone was home to more than 100 million smart phone users. By 2014, 90 million people will use tablets in the U.S., which will represent 36% of the overall Internet population. Why is this important to your business? Regardless of size, the state of mobile now insists that you think through a dedicated experience for customer engagement and commerce alike.

For years, web designers would not only develop sites, but also test their aesthetics and functionality in multiple browsers using the most common operating systems. Additionally, user testing ensured that the desired click paths and outcomes were optimized. No site can truly launch until it performs as designed for the masses. As any designer will tell you, if the click path breaks down or introduces friction, visitor frustration and abandonment isn’t far behind.

Similar to the Web, mobile is now a dedicated channel that represents a means to an end. Or said another way, mobile has become an exclusive experience rather than a bridge between people and information on the traditional or desktop web. It is still largely assumed that people on mobile devices represent the minority of web users and thus require less focus and resources than those who use desktop or laptop PCs. But with the proliferation of smart phones and tablets, the balance is shifting. The question is; have you revisited your web and mobile strategies to meet the needs and expectations of your connected customers?

Let’s take Facebook as an example. The company faces a serious dilemma as its mobile site m.facebook.com, and its dedicated app for iOS, Android, Microsoft, and Blackberry, rival its classic website Facebook.com. In May 2012, comScore reported that for the first time, mobile users in the U.S. spent more time in Facebook than those using desktops and laptops, 441 minutes vs. 391 per month. While the company has designed successful mobile products to deliver optimized, on-the-go experiences for the small screens, it has not found a viable business model to monetize this profound shift. Facebook makes the lion share of its billion-dollar revenue by serving four to seven ads at a time on the desktop. On the mobile, it only presents a few per day in its micro news feed. If a tech-savvy company such as Facebook faces this quandary, chances are, you will as well.

In a mobile economy, apps become the currency of a new information exchange. One of the most fascinating and least understood aspects of apps is that they create a contained experience that essentially is its own Internet. Everything your customer needs or could possibly need should be included in the app. And those mobile browsers that need to hit the traditional web, visitors will expect to see a page optimized for the smaller screen. Think about it for a moment. How many times have you tried to hit a site from your phone or tablet only to quit in frustration when the site would not load correctly on your screen? You may or may not choose or remember to visit that site later and that’s just one example of how designing for experiences is as much a part of form and function as it is about platform-centricity.

That ‘s the point. Customer behavior is evolving. Technology is evolving. Is your digital strategy evolving? Is it considering shifts in attention, activity, and expectations and designing new experiences to react and lead accordingly?

The time is now to answer these questions and more…

Who on your team is thinking about designing mobile experiences? How is mobile tied to the overall digital strategy? How is social and mobile complementing your web strategy? More importantly, how are people connecting or attempting to connect with you and how would they define the experience?

Answering these questions will help you design for tomorrow’s digital strategy right now. The future of online experiences is distributed, but it is also integrated in its ability to tell your story while delivering exceptional experiences optimized for each channel. Like the classic web and social media, mobile is just one of the many channels that requires a dedicated approach. And, as we’re learning, mobile will become one of the most if not the most important channel for customer engagement.

These days, we’re running fast…sometimes too fast. Our social networks keep us connected, but in some ways they’re also pulling us away from our center. Our social streams feed us information about our friends, family, events and even the latest viral videos or trends, but the currents too can overwhelm us.

In a time when multitasking is just a way of life and communication is always on, I often wonder how distorted our perspective becomes until we realize clarity is paramount to productivity. Think about it for a moment. We expect immediate responses to our texts, emails, and DMs yet we grumble at having too many messages to which we need to read and respond. We may in fact be our own worst enemy not the technology we often blame. For every message you send, it seems that in an electronic game of hot potato, two always return. Connectedness comes at a very real human cost.

As we stray away from our comfort zone, we by default discover comfort by creating a new center. But that center requires consideration now and over time to ensure that we’re not only centered, but also moving along a path that takes us in a desirable direction. Seeking balance is more important than we might realize. Finding it may prove elusive for many, but pursuing balance and tracking toward a chosen destination is essential.

I spent some time with good friend Esteban Contreras where we discussed of course the latest books and my research at Altimeter Group. But, I also took it as a moment to reflect on the balance between professional and personal aspirations. I wanted to share the conversation with you here…

Esteban Contreras: Your book Engage further established you as a thought leader. What’s the story behind that book?

Brian Solis: Believe it or not, Engage has an interesting back story behind it… one that I rarely tell.

In 2007, I published the original Social Media Manifesto online to show exactly how businesses would benefit from strategic social media initiatives. It was huge.

But my first best-selling book was actually Putting the Public Back in Public Relations with Dierdre Breakenridge. We set out to show businesses how important the role of the public would become in marketing, advertising and customer service. I was about to tackle writing the follow up to the book, but noticed something in the process of promoting the last book…brands were embracing social media in a rather anti-social manner. They were using new tools to market in old ways. It was time to show businesses that social media was about meaningful and beneficial engagement on both sides.

I brought the idea to a good friend of mine and was given the green light to immediately begin writing it. However, it was written under a different title and also featured a different cover. The book was originally called The Social Media Manifesto. At the 11th hour, I changed my mind. I wanted the book to be less about social media and more about engagement where social media became the channel for building relationships, gaining insights, and fostering loyalty and advocacy. Of course, I addressed commerce and ROI as well, but I did so in a way that aligned business objectives with customer expectations. This lead to an entirely new name, cover, and also to the inclusion of Ashton Kutcher for the book’s foreword.

Social Media Manifesto: Original cover design

Another side story about the book is that it actually exists in two unique forms. The first edition was big. It’s size and density neared text book status. That was its goal however, to become the reference manual for social strategists. When it came time to publish the book in paperback form, I was asked if I wanted to make any changes. The publisher probably had a few updates in mind, but instead I took the opportunity to completely revise the book. I cut chapters, I cut blocks of text, I rewrote sentences and I added new experiences and lessons learned. The “revised and updated” edition is now commonly referred to as Engage 2 (note, not 2.0).

EC: The End of Business As Usual, has also been a great success. Do you see yourself following up with a fourth book at this point?

Solis: You never know.

The End of Business as Usual is an important book and I will support it for years to come. It’s not a book about social media. It’s a book for business executives to see how consumer behavior is changing, how technology impacts decision making, and how the rise of connected consumerism will impact the bottom line. Executives don’t care about Facebook or Twitter or smartphones for that matter. They care about objectives and meeting or exceeding them. To engage the connected customer requires a different approach.

Businesses must become adaptive in order to survive what I call Digital Darwinism, the phenomenon where evolution of society and technology evolve faster than the ability to adapt. Businesses are and will continue to fall because they focus on optimization, efficiencies, profits, and not on innovation and transformation to compete for tomorrow’s customer. This is a message that’s more important than ever before and this book shows executives how to recognize new opportunities and lead new and lucrative business strategies from the top down.

It’s also written for new media and social strategists who are fed up with the fear and skepticism that deflates their ballooning ideas. For everyone that asks them about ROI, the answer should be, “here, read this book.”

EC: Tell us about your experience at Altimeter Group and your particular role as Principal.

Solis: My work at Altimeter Group is both rewarding and eye-opening. I often say that we cannot possibly become “gurus” or experts of any medium that evolves faster than the ability to master it. I work with business executives and social strategists to bridge the gap between business objectives and social media strategies. Once the data is collected and analyzed, once internal conversations are transcribed and dissected, you start to see opportunities to bring people, departments, and thinking together. The work then becomes about recognizing new opportunities, direction, and the change necessary to create alignment toward new directions.

The research that we do helps us capture a state of “what is” and when combined with experience and the vision of the other analysts in the firm, you can start to chart a map to what “should be.”

EC: Beyond your work at Altimeter, you continue to be an avid blogger, content producer, speaker and event organizer. What would you say is the secret to maintaining balance in life?

Solis: The strive for balance is a journey and not a destination. Balance is less like spinning plates and more like running your finger around the rim of partially filled crystal bowls with varying depths of liquids. Each singing bowl makes a unique sound and as a result, music to “one’s” ears. When we think about the spinning plate metaphor, we think about how our quest for balance affects those around us as well as our pursuit to keep everything spinning simultaneously without falling and breaking. When you think about the bowls, you make music, the music you like, by bringing together different sounds. And it’s different every time. The point is, balance is a state of what’s important to you and those around you in the moment.

Guest post by Bryan Rhoades, global content strategy, Intel

Today’s web is an endless 24/7 cycle fed by content and social actions. In this cycle, brands are realizing that content is currency and social actions are the transactions in this marketplace for eyeballs and attention. To remain relevant, not only do brands need to produce more interesting, useful and more timely content, they need to adapt to a new “social publishing model” to best feed the social graph and this hungry cycle.

I’ve listed two ways below that our brand, Intel, is tackling this content and social publishing challenge.

First, we built a new social publishing platform called “iQ” that we use to feed the graph and better integrate our owned and paid media strategies. The iQ by Intel platform leverages the social actions of our global employees to curate content that is grabbing Intel’s collective attention. In addition to original content, we source and surface content from these social actions (FB Likes, RTs, +1’s) combined with an intelligent algorithm that filters content based on social data points like recency, bit’ly clicks, shares and defiance from the norm, etc.

iQ is a blend of content flowing from the social actions of employees (referred to as “Flow” content) and original content developed by the brand (or our partners like The Creators Project and contributors, that we refer to as “Stock” content). This “Stock & Flow” approach is relatively new, but in our case borrowed from others in the industry, including the popular Percolate publishing platform. iQ blends original Stock & Flow content to produce a very timely branded storytelling platform to feed the social web and our own social properties on Facebook and Twitter. We believe this to be an effective way to get our story (and the World’s technology story) into the social graph.

Secondly, social publishing is a challenge for brands and businesses. They have not historically been structured for publishing. However, brands are excellent at producing the more traditional “Stock” content like video, TV commercials, campaigns, websites, etc. But today’s Facebook status update or ephemeral tweet requires daily and oftentimes sub-daily content. Traditional Stock content is great when you have it, but no brand is resourced for the daily TV ad or video.

At Intel, we are implementing a 3-tiered approach to content production (see “Social Content Tiers” diagram below). The top tier includes the longer-lead or more traditional content that brands have been generating for years, i.e. the videos, TV spots, the programs and partnerships that are highly produced and require greater resources. In the middle we have quicker, several times a week stories, visual graphics, blog posts and really anything interesting we can get our hands on. At the bottom is the highly frequent and ephemeral content. These are the daily and sub-daily Facebook status updates, Google+ posts and tweets from branded accounts and employees. Looking at content in this manner helps us to better manage the content pipeline. iQ manifests this process and is an engine towards output.

We launched “iQ by Intel” as a BETA in English just over a month ago. So far, we’re seeing great results in its aiding of social content publishing and feeding our social properties with content. Its “touch-friendly” design is built for the next generation of devices and its sourcing of content through curation, including direct publishing from Twitter through #iQ tweets from employees, has been successful.

Lastly, iQ and our publishing model allows us to tell our bigger technology story. Intel is an ingredient in almost every technical ecosystem on the planet. We are lucky as far as brands go that we can help tell this story, that we can follow technology to all of the beautiful places it goes, and also narrate on the challenges and obstacles facing our modern world.

Follow @bryanrhoads on Twitter

This is part of a series on brand journalism / brand publishing as told by the businesses that are paving the way. Please send me a note if you would like to tell your company’s story on its move to what Tom Foremski dubbed EC=MC, Every Company is a Media Company.

Disclosure: Intel is a client of Altimeter Group

Cara Friedman is the president of Likeable Community College, a social media training program for community managers and other social media professionals.

To be successful in social media and community management you need to keep track of the constant changes to that ecosystem. That’s because everything you know about Facebook, Twitter, and other social spaces today will somehow be different in six months. Layouts will be altered, features will be added or removed, and new social networks may pop up.

So how should you keep track of all these moving parts? Here are six tips for staying on top of social media.

1. Blogs

There are hundreds of blogs focused on social media. Keep it simple by signing up to RSS feeds and spend twenty minutes every morning catching up on your social media news. Stick to blogs that are updated daily and focus on providing content in social media and technology.

Consider adding these blogs to your RSS feed to get started: SocialTimes, Social Media Examiner, TechCrunch, and SocialMediaToday.

2. Webinars

Webinars are often offered by agencies and make for good social media resources. You can find webinars by searching on Twitter or registering on directories that list the week’s webinars. You can also attend paid webinars that go beyond the basics. In either case, you can find a good starter list at webinarlistings.com.

3. Trending Topics

Yes, reading your blogs in the morning is effective but information travels fast so pay attention to what’s trending on Twitter, too. First, make sure that you check your Twitter trend settings. Certain settings will spit out tailored trends, which you should probably avoid.

Also, if you don’t understand why a certain word or phrase is trending you can check out whatthetrend.com for explanations.

4. Newsletters

Not all newsletters are spam. Some are actually worth signing up for. If you’re OK with getting a daily newsletter, check out SmartBrief. If you prefer a weekly roundup then take a look at SocialFresh. These newsletters curate the best social media content from the web and create original highly informative articles as well.

5. Meetups and Tweetups

Whether in person at a meetup or virtually at a tweetup, chatting with like-minded individuals will keep you on your toes, help you predict what’s coming next, and teach you new things about how others are behaving in social media. To find a group of social media fanatics near you check out Meetup.com.

6. Training and Certification

If you are serious about educating yourself in the social space you may consider signing up for a training program or certification course. Whether you are looking for a six-week crash course or an ongoing education program, resources are available. To start, you can check out WOMM-COM and HootSuiteU.