The hash tag (#), which was created by the Twitter community to help bring order to the service’s inherent chaos, has become one of the Internet’s most powerful organizing and amplification tools. Free Twitter clients like TweetDeck and HootSuite do a good job of catching mentions of your brand or products. If the volume of mentions is large, or if you want to filter for sentiment to detect a surgeon negativity, you’ll need a paid listing tool like Radian6, Lithium or Sysomos. The target publication date is late 2012. Twitter is the enigma of social networks. MORE >>

and Inbound Marketing Harnessing social & new media to amplify your brand, sustain your community and make you stand out from the rest! preface this post by saying that some brands have entered social media with “cool equity&# giving them an advantage but not necessarily maximizing their community potential. It’s easy to under-serve the community and having a high number of fans does not a supportive community make. Influence & dissemination :  Influence is tribal; communities are led by subsets of people who are more tribal. Promotion? MORE >>

Awareness Networks, Social Marketing Hub an enterprise class community platform has launched their own tool that has Facebook, youtube, flickr, Twitter, and of course connect with their own community features. Spewing corporate content to every known social channel may make your life easier as a marketer, but could cause serious ramifications to the trust of your community. Pick your battles and remember that the needs of the LinkedIn community are far different than those of MySpace, be selective by first knowing your socialgraphics of your customer base. Thanks! MORE >>

sentiment trend view from Scout Labs. Once you’ve set up your search in Scout Labs, within seconds and a couple of clicks you have charts and graphs for volume of articles, share of voice compared to competitors you may set up to track as well and the kicker – automated sentiment so you know if the talk about you is good, bad or neutral. Since this is manually scored in Radian6, you just saved yourself a fair bit of time to produce a sentiment report, though it requires that you trust the automation. Any word on when we'll see sentiment? monthly. MORE >>

C: Twitter (Tweetdeck) is my favourite because of its immediacy. My top sites include: www.redcubemarketing.com www.chrisbrogan.com www.treypennington.com www.brasstackthinking.com www.conversationagent.com My days include time in Tweetdeck , Social Mention , Google Reader and visits to LinkedIn and Facebook. Chris’s aim is to ‘rethink marketing in the digital age’ , to educate and inform whilst developing clear strategies that bring results. You can follow Chris on Twitter – ( @Chris_Hall1 ) G: How and why did you get into social media business? Listen more than you talk. MORE >>