We all know the three most popular social media apps in our toolkit are: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. But what else are companies using to have an edge and be more efficient and productive in their social media efforts? How are they actually Tweeting? How are they monitoring? Here are five tools that were found to be popular and widely used among brands and businesses! Cotweet. Not so awesome: There can be issues with lag time in Tweets being posted and there is a lack of autofill of Twitter names for tagging in tweets and hashtags. Companies that use it: Whole foods. Radian6. Tweetdeck. MORE >>

The best businesses have the marketing baked into the product and/or service. That seems rudimentary enough, but leave it to Seth Godin to say it in such an easy to understand way. Godin's been thinking, writing and talking this way for a very long time, but he lives it as well. Have you been following his latest venture, The Domino Project ? His newly launched publishing company (in partnership with Amazon ) was created to re-energize a lagging book publishing industry and he's definitely been shaking things up. ploughed through the book in about an hour. smiled the whole way through. Classy. MORE >>

People love to share their ideas. The social web accelerates sharing of ideas and crowds can get excited about an idea. Ideas represent change, innovation and solutions to old problems. However, an idea with no execution is simply a colorful conversation. Execution is moving an idea into multiple processes of building something and bringing it to market for consumption.  Ideation is fun and exciting. Execution is hard work and sometimes boring. Ideas can come from chaos. Execution comes from organization.  Ideas come from the crowd. Execution comes from the few. Qualified Resources. Attraction. MORE >>

Yes, it’s Facebook question of the week time, but all you people have failed me. Minus Ryan Cox’s 20,000 questions, not one of you has asked a single question. Do you feel guilty yet? Head over there and post a question on our wall. Go ahead. I’ll wait. Awesome! Thank you! few weeks ago, I spoke at the Vocus User’s Conference about the PR pro and blogger relationship. Because I sit on both sides of that relationship, it’s pretty easy to say what works and what doesn’t work. So here you go (as a return favor for posting a question on our Facebook wall)! MORE >>

Is your Facebook Insights Dashboard filled with peaks and valleys? Do the same people do all of the commenting and liking? Do you have a lot of likes, but very little comments? Does your organization have several sub-pages with little or no traffic? If you answered yes to any of the questions, then you may want to take a cue from the U.S. Navy and reality shows everywhere and consider a scavenger hunt. Take a look at the case study they pulled together below detailing why they developed the scavenger hunt, how they did it, their results, and their lessons learned. Government 2.0 MORE >>