I Can't Play With Everything - 10 Things in 10 Minutes

I'm presenting today at the New Marketing Summit. Based on the variety of presentations yesterday and the crowd it should go well. Everyone is really there to learn about practical things they can do and to learn from others like myself who are out there currently doing it.

When Chris Brogan asked me to speak he said he was having a bunch of presenters do short, quick, ten minute presentations. I thought this sounded like fun but wanted it to be informative too. So I came up with the title of "I Can't Play With Everything" and wanted to focus on ten real world things that anyone could do to start using social media. We seem to forget that you've got to start somewhere so I wanted to give people little quick things they could do on a lunch break to begin playing in the space.

Here is the presentation I am giving and all of the links that people will need if they want to find out more. I'm posting this now, so that I can point everyone at the summit to it to find links in case they couldn't write them down fast enough when I was flying through this just before lunch.

I Can't Play With Everything

10 Things in 10 Minutes:

1. Google yourself, your brand, your competitors. See what is being said and where you rank.
2. Set up multiple Google Alerts based around anything you want to be automatically notified about when a post appears online.
3. Begin using Twitter. Even if you use it more to read what others are saying then saying much yourself. Use Twitter Search to see what you might have missed on a topic such as your brand.
4. Join a social network. The two I recommend getting started with are LinkedIn and Facebook
5. Sign up for newsletters. The three I showed are MarketingVox, WOMMA and MarketingProfs as great starters to keep you informed.
6. Get a Flickr account even if you don't plan on sharing photos. Search for events that you know are going on to start getting to know the people and faces.
7. Read constantly. Shelfari and Goodreads can both help you see what other people are reading and get your new marketing bookshelf started.
8. Attend events because nothing beats face-to-face. I love using Upcoming to see what is going on and what my friends are attending.
9. Evernote is what I use to capture everything that gets my attention. I like to think of it as my virtual Moleskine.
10. Yelp allows you to review and discover vendors of all sorts anywhere in the world.

Of course as soon as I finished putting together this presentation I had a million more ideas of things that people could get started with. If you were in the session and had a question please leave it here and I'll be happy to answer it or drop me an e-mail.

What other things would you tell people to try?

Update: I recorded a podcast version of this today on Managing the Gray.  (direct MP3 link)