Right now I’m using a very nifty tool I found on another blog, called “Reblog It!”, and made by Zemanta. They say it’s “the easiest way to report interesting stuff to your blog” – and I love practising on my own site just to see if everything they say is true.
You’ll be glad to know I’m not “reblogging” something boring or useless – here’s an excellent quote from the blog of Social Media Club Phoenix, on how to know if your social media consultant “gets it”.
“How do you know your social media vendor really knows what s/he’s talking about? It’s simple. Look at his/her portfolio, the same way you would look at a photographer’s or a designer’s. That portfolio is on the web, and should be easily searchable. Start with Google. Google your vendor’s name. No matter how much you don’t know about social media, you can do this part. Do you see your vendor on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, other social sites? That’s the bare minimum. Read your vendor’s blog or his Tumblr, or his comments on the blogs of others. Is s/he a valuable member of his/her community? Engaged? Respected? Thoughtful? Social media is a very quickly evolving space, and new tools come out every day.”
Just so you know, that was a very simple drag-and-drop. What’s more, Zemanta’s Reblog tool is taking care of the attribution and the backlink. That’s pretty important in this day of easy theft of intellectual property.
Looks like we’ve killed two birds with one stone – a quick and easy product review (yes, Zemanta, I’ll be using your stuff again). And a very short lesson on how to know if your social media professional gets it.
On the second topic, if your professional unafraid to experiment in public, as I just did, you can probably trust them to be authentic in their treatment of your material as well. And authenticity is a very good thing in the social media universe.
