If you don’t have kids yourself, it can be intimidating to go into a maternity store or a kids store to find that special gift for a new baby, or even a young niece or nephew. What does a newborn infant wear? What size do you get? What kind of toys are safe for a baby?

That’s where Savvy Auntie’s Melanie Notkin comes in. She’ll help you find the cool stuff for kids of all ages and look cool doing it. She’s also creating an online community that will offer advice from a range of experts so you can learn the ins and outs of raising kids so you’re not totally in the dark when the kiddies come to visit.

The website is due to launch soon, but Melanie Notkin, Savvy Auntie founder has her blog up here, with stories of her adventures as an entrepreneur and her inspiration for the site, as well as her Cafe Press shop with lots of fun logo items to show off your Savvy Auntie-ness. Check it out and sign up for the beta launch of the new site!

We just launched a new website for San Jose Real Estate Agent CJ Brasiel. The property is in the Cambrian Estates neighborhood, and has a remarkable view of the mountains. If you’re in the market for an affordable 4 bed 2.5 bath home, check it out

I can’t tell you how many titles I had for this post. “Social media, do you really want to?”, Social media, participate or go home”, and “Social media – it’s about the interaction stupid”. Basically it all comes down to one thing; if you are going to get involved in social media marketing do it because you’re interested. Do it for the love of community interaction and interacting with current and future customers. But don’t do it with the sole motivation of increasing traffic or collecting “friends”.

I answered a question a few days ago on a popular business networking site and got a response from the poster that really triggered me. Many of the posts he’d gotten were flippant and self centered. Not many took the time to even fully read the question, much less think about it. It was clear they were posting to increase their number of answers rather than to help. He didn’t feel he’d gotten much value out of his interaction on the site.

This kind of behavior is very common, and it devalues the whole idea of social media. It’s supposed to be a community folks, it’s supposed to be about helping out some people and learning from others. There’s not a day goes by that I don’t learn a dozen things from my social media contacts. Sometimes it leads to a job, but often it’s not a job I landed at first contact, but after having helped someone find a solution and then developing a relationship.

A colleague recently told me a story about a meeting where she was asked to set up a personality on LinkedIn complete with seeded questions and answers, connections that topped the 500 mark, and recommendations from “customers and colleagues”. They didn’t have time to engage their own customers. She refused the rather lucrative offer, but probably they found somebody to build them their persona.

I fully understand the idea that the more leads or connections you have the more likely one of them will develop into an opportunity. It’s just not the way I want to do business.

The same holds true on social media sites like myspace, Facebook and Twitter. If you’re going to take the time to be a presence there, participate! Add value to the community and the community will remember you as an asset. Post an overwhelming number of “me too!” comments, or send daily invitations to fight your vampire and people are going to tire of it.

If you want to participate in social media, that’s wonderful. Spend the time to learn what tools are right for the way you do business,(or hire me to help you figure it out). Decide how much time you have to spend, and what you really want to get out of it. Then set up a blog, dive into some of the existing networks and participate.

If you don’t have the time to participate, give back to the community and get involved, do us all a favor and just don’t.

Twitter has officially taken over the universe. In my previous post I talked about why, and how it can be useful to you and your business.
As with everything web, tools are popping up all over to help you make Twitter more productive and interesting.

Twitter stats
Tells you what your stats are. How much you post and relative to whom. You might be surprised what words you use the most and who’s the most active in your circle.

Tweet Clouds
Want to know what you favorite Tweeter is talking about the most? Tweet Cloud pulls all the words out of a user’s archive and organizes them in a tag cloud. Try yours and see if your messaging is as on target as you think it is.

Twitterment
Search Twitter by keyword, not just posts, but bios too, so you can find th people who are talking about your subject or work in that space.

Twitterverse
Quickly scan tag clouds of the most recent discussions

TweetLater
Allows you to set ups your tweets to be sent when you want them to. Planning a product launch but might be on a plane at the crucial moment? Problem solved.

Twittervision
Get a map view of your twitterlicious world

Email Twitter
Send your tweets by email and skip the SMS charges.

TwitDir
A nice mashup that shows you the top 100 followed, posters, favorites etc, or type in a name or location and find people who are tweeting.

Hashtags
When an event is being tweeted by a group, it’s a great idea to pull all the archives together so that participants and others can view the tweets and gain as much value as possible. When Mzinga and Prospero merged their companies they used Twitter for the Q and A sessions on the merger. The South by Southwest conference (SWSX) was widely covered by Twitterati.
Hashtags is an opt-in service. You must follow @hashtags for the service to index your tweets.

Group Tweet
Allows you to send private messages to a group of friends, rather than just one.
Now you can spam all of your friends at once! No, really. It’s useful if you have a work group or team using Twitter to communicate and you don’t necessarily want the whole world to read the post. Maybe a replacement for other IM clients?

Twitter Clients – 3 of our favs.

Twhirl
Twhirl lets you keep a stream of your timeline in a pop-up window and tweet to your heart’s content. One of it’s best feature IMHO is that it allows you to reply, direct message or re-tweet someone’s post with one click.

Twitteriffic
A Mac client very much like Twhirl, but less prone to crashing.

Twitteroo
A windows client for twittering the day away.

Twitter Firefox Add-ons

Twitbin
A Firefox Add-on that allows you to post and see posts in your browser window.

Power Twitter
Photo and Video sharing with embedded youtube or flickr
tinyurls are unwound so you know where they link to before you click the
Additional user information is mapped to twitter users flickr accounts, blog posts, del.icio.us links etc

Twitter Bar
Let’s you post to Twitter right from your address bar

TwittyTunes
Post your favorite tunes to Twitter, or send links to favorite videos, websites

Wordpress and blog tools for Twitter

Twitterfeed
Will scan your blog at specified times and post the blog to Twittering

Twitter tools
A sweet Wordpress plug-in. Archive or digest your tweets on your blog, post to twitter from your sidebar

Twit this
Make it easy for people to tweet your posts

Twitter Sidebar Widget
Update your blog with your Twitter brilliance in an easily customizable format.

When I tell people I use Twitter, I get one of three responses. “What’s that?” “What a time drain…”, or “I just love Twitter”

For the first one, I know they probably aren’t aware of Social Media or what it can do for their business.

The second have a vague awareness of it, and may even have a Twitter account, but they haven’t yet made it work for them.

The third group are either young and use Twitter as an extended SMS or chat feature, or they are business people who are progressive enough to see it’s value.

I’m somewhere in between.
The first time I signed up I posted a couple of times and gave it up as a time suck. Posting every time I get up to let the dog out seems vain and frivolous, and it takes valuable time that could be used to get things done. As it was, I was spending at least 2 hours a day catching up on the rss feeds of the various blogs that serve my industry.

Then I started noticing that the people who are blogging the most about Social Media have Twitter accounts, and they often micro-blog about their posts or other news on Twitter, (Doh!) I started following them on Twitter, where I could see the micro-blogs of my favorites all in one place, complete with links to news of the day, and if I want to comment on it I can enter the conversations going on in a much more immediate way than by posting a comment on a blog or web page.

For a business like mine, Twitter works because I can keep up on what’s going on in several areas of interest and participate in those discussions in a relatively short amount of time. I can learn about new standards and practices almost as they are developed.

Come on, how can it possibly be useful?
Twitter can be useful in a number of ways that aren’t readily visible at first glance.

I posted a frustrated tweet with a new browser that I was testing, and didn’t recommend it. Within 15 minutes someone from the browser’s social media team had direct messaged me and asked how they could improve their product. I was floored. Turns out that you can use Twitter’s powerful tracking feature to get a direct message delivered by SMS to your phone or chat client whenever somebody tweets about the keywords you request. Companies like HR Block uses tracking to respond to people who tweet about them. Imagine the power this adds to your customer service team. You can address issues and put out potential fires before they even flare up. Or can use it to track applications that you use to keep on top of the latest news.

For example, I can set a track for “Wordpress” and see every Tweet related to Wordpress.
Just sms one of the following commands to your Twitter account:

• track - get a list of subjects that you are currently tracking
• track off - turn all tracking off for your account
• track subject - starts to track subject
• untrack subject - turns tracking off on subject
• whois username - find out more about the person sending the message

Twitter up your events
It’s become quite common for companies to ask people to twitter their events. You can get a blow-by-blow account from people who are right there and see multiple perspectives at once. You can ask questions about the event or the speaker when the tweeter is still there, and interact, even though you’re not there.

I regularly Twitter my training schedule for the Avon Walk this summer, and have seen several donations to the cause from people I don’t know and would otherwise not have reached. I also got a job designing a social media newsroom from a response to a question posted on Twitter.

Even more impressive is the Frozen Pea fund, started for Susan Reynolds when she discovered she had breast cancer. Not only is she helping others through her regular posts about her life with cancer, but the community has rallied to help pay medical bills.

San Francisco war protesters used Twitter to organize protest events and avoid arrest.

Connect connect, connect
Twitter allows you access to people who are at the leading edge of their field. Don’t abuse the privilege and harass them, but take advantage of the opportunity to let them know you respect their opinions, and add yours when it is appropriate. Add your favorites to other networks like Xing, Linkedin and Facebook. If they aren’t accepting new invitations, fine, be respectful of that and just remain part of the conversation.
Don’t just listen to your own circle. Check out who the people you are following follow and see if you want to add them to your list. Periodically check the public timeline to see who’s talking that you might want to follow.

Don’t follow everybody
As un-social as that sounds, trust me, it’s good advice. There are people who try to follow just about everybody to get the most followers they can. Just because they are following you doesn’t mean you have to follow back. If you don’t know them, peruse their archives and see if there is a shared interest. See if they frequently post reams of drivel and then decide if you want to see their posts in your timeline.

Market yourself
Don’t think anybody is going to stay following you if all you ever talk about is yourself and how wonderful you are. You have to reach out more than that and participate in the conversation. Re-tweet posts you think others may not have seen yet. Send links to information you’ve found of value or have a question about that someone else in your circle might find useful. Help people out by answering their questions for them or directing them to someone who can.

Too much tweeting
If you don’t have anything useful to say, don’t say anything. Blabbering on about your ingrown toenail isn’t going to make you friends. Neither is endless griping about your job, your boss or the guy in the next cube. Don’t forget, Twitter is archiving it all for posterity. Unless you delete your account and start over, your words live on a lot longer than you may wish them to. If you get un-followed a lot, check to see if you are staying on topic or just sitting in a corner griping to yourself.

Stay tuned for part two, Twitter tools, where I’ll give you a list of tools that can help increase your Twitter productivity.

If you just scanned the recent New York Times article suggesting that writers are blogging themselves to death, you may have wondered how this kind of thing can happen. The Times associates blogging with sweat shops and relates the two recent deaths of prominent bloggers to the 24/7 nature of our industry. “Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.”

Michael Arrington from the popular technology blog Tech Crunch is quoted as saying “There’s no time ever — including whenyou’re sleeping — when you’re not worried about missing a story,”.

How has journalism changed from the old “Stop the presses” rush to get a story posted before the print run? Remember His Girl Friday?

OK, so a lot has changed. There is more money in it if you’re successful, and the presses run 24/7. But let’s not blame writers passion for the death of two bloggers.

Jason Calcanis, founder of Mahalo, knew the bloggers in question, and has a different take on what killed them. Entrepreneurship. Any one of us who survived the dot com boom can recognize the signs. We’ve all driven ourselves into the ground at one point or another. Spent days living on Jolt and red Twizzlers delivered by Webvan because nobody wanted to leave the office for food.

Many of us look back on those days and remember the post-traumatic stress disorder when the crash came. Some of us took it as at lesson and learned to find balance in our lives and our work and not go there again.

But others who either didn’t step back from it and see it for the madness it was, or who believe they can “do it better this time” are still out there, slamming down jolt and passing out over their keyboards to meet their deadlines. I still find myself snowed under site launches and marketing campaigns and unable to see the top of the pile on occasion, and it’s only my faithful partner dragging me off to the beach for some downtime who saves me.

Blogging can develop into an obsession whether it’s your revenue stream or not. Gaping Void’s Hugh MacLeod puts it brilliantly in his cartoon about the obsession of micro-blogging, and why he deleted his Twitter account.

So what’s the answer?
Nobody knows. People will always be driven to stay on top of the heap. It’s not like you can just step back for a minute and
take a break. Or is it?

Local Realtor CJ Brasiel. comes to us to create mini-sites for her real estate listings in San Jose. She just listed this lovely condo in Midtown PlazaCheck it out.

Pretty much everybody who knows me has heard I’m walking 40 miles in July in the Avon Foundation’s walk for breast cancer research and treatment. (Have I asked you to donate yet?)

Anyway, the biggest challenge has been wedging training time into my schedule. We bought a treadmill so we didn’t have to go to the gym, but still, not enough time in a day.

A friend sent me a link to this site and it was an easy jump to see how we could be using our multi-tasking skills. After a lot of insanely complex design concepts, in the long run we ended up with a shelf across the arms of the treadmill with some 2 inch pvc piping to secure the shelf in place, a $50 wall mount for a monitor, and it was all set. We can switch out laptops when we want to work on specific projects, or just leave the “spare” plugged in for whoever wants to walk-n-surf.

Beyond the obvious gains in weight loss and fitness, this has turned out to be a block of time that I use to catch up on social networks, read rss feeds, do research for clients or upcoming personal projects and catch up on the latest in coding. I’ve added a couple of new tools to my browser to make life a little easier. Diigo is a bookmarking service that allows me to bookmark, highlight or share content online, and I can access and search these items from any computer or on my iphone.

Twhirl lets me keep up on what my friends and colleagues are up to while I’m working, but doesn’t take up too much space on the monitor. Stumble is for just surfing for inspiration, art or tools.

Intrigued? Do it yourself, and take your inspiration from some more examples. or spend the 4K for a Steelcase Treadmill Workstation…

Russ Johnson has worked in the medical device field for over 25 years. Now that he’s formed his own company, Device Direction, he is helping companies working in the medical device industry promote their products. He does everything from helping them clearly define their marketing opportunities to product planning and implementation.

Since the company is new, Russ needed to build a website that will help him get the word out to medical device companies world wide, and present his services and experience in a website that gets to the point quickly. What’s the point?
If you are in the medical device field, and you need a marketing professional to help you launch a new product, or light a fire under an exisisting campaign, Russ Johnson is who you should be talking to.