Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Buzz, StumbleUpon, LinkedIN, etc. It’s overload, right? I mean email is enough. Then add Skype and chat and text messages and how do you keep up?

Here’s what’s happening: the old forms of media are being displaced in our mobile, ADD, sound-byte world.

People can’t sit still to watch news on TV and reading a book, a magazine or a newspaper is for old timers.

What does this mean? That marketing is changing. FAST! It means that companies have to become a media company. I know. Relax. Breathe.

Social networks are a platform to do 2 things: communicate with your marketplace and tell your story.

Communication with the marketplace means that you get to listen in as people talk about your company, employees, services and your competitors! Social networks become a tool for Reputation Management. These applications also are a way to sell and respond. For example, Comcast uses twitter to fix problems one and a time.

The other side of the coin is that it’s easy to tell your story. What you don’t have a story?

Seth Godin asks What’s your Super Power?

Many ISP’s tell me that it’s about their employees, that they are local, that they answer the phone. Well, tell that story. Talk about your employees. Discuss customers and cases. People do business with people not companies. Social media let’s you make that connection to your marketplace.

Need help?

Social Media Strategy for Service Providers on Friday, June 04, 2010 from 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM (ET) – Register here.

Linkshare is presenting What Not to Do on Facebook for Business on Thursday May 27 at 2 PM. Register here.

With real unemployment above 17% nationwide, we are moving into the Era of Freelancers.

What does that mean?

The idea of job security is ended. The responsibility for job security, income, benefits and retirement will be solely in the hands of the workers from now on.

Whether you intended to be a Freelancer or not, you will need to make decisions and embrace the path of a freelancer to find some success.

Register for the Lunch 2.0 talk on March 10 here.

You can’t read any marketing material without hearing about social media – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN, Google Buzz, tec. — but blogging is also a social platform. Twitter is defined as a micro-blogging service. Instead of a whole paragraph or a whole page, it is a 140 character blog post to the Twitter service. Who says you can’t blog?

Why blog?

A bunch of reasons including to demonstrate your subject matter expertise; for publicity (PR); to become a Trusted Advisor; for reputation; or to just be heard.

In general, you blog for marketing.

A side effect of blogging (and other social networking) is SEO (search engine optimization) – or at the very least, search engine results. If you create enough organic, genuine content around your subject or topic (or keyword), the search engines will ikely find it (eventually). The more content and the more frequent you create content, the better your search results. So blog often.