With many individuals finding great success with social media (and as an aside, a basic understanding of search engine optimization), they immediately consider themselves social media marketers and consultants (as well as seasoned SEOs) and offer to sell their promotional services. What skills, though, do successful social media marketers have that put these individuals above the average (or addicted) social media user, and better yet, above the traditional marketer? I asked several social media consultants, bloggers, marketers, search engine optimizers, and social media addicts about what they considered to be essential skills and characteristics of the most efficient and results-driven social media consultants. In the many paragraphs that follow, learn from many of the experts and hear what they consider success when using social media to engage with consumers about products and services.

Maki, Internet Marketing and Social Media Blogger: The main characteristic [social media marketers] need to have is a genuine curiosity/interest in social media, particularly on how it influences human relationships and business practices. This is not just standard required job skills but rather a deep interest that pervades one’s day to day life. One needs to constantly be informed of the latest technologies while striving always to learn and improve one’s knowledge levels. In order to do well when marketing, one should have tactical knowledge and ideally, first-hand experience of the specific social media platform. This will help a great deal in planning and managing successful marketing campaigns.

Greetings all from SXSW! It’s been an incredibly busy and physically taxing few days (with little hotel internet and no real opportunities to sit down and edit posts), so you’re seeing yesterday’s keynote today (and numerous other posts to be put on this blog in the upcoming days). Here we go with the highly-talked-about keynote presentation at South by Southwest…

Just like an Apple keynote, they tried to build up some serious momentum for this event. In fact, before Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook came out into the open, they dimmed the lights, pumped up the volume, and introduced Mark with some catchy Daft Punk tunes.

This keynote has been heavily discussed, mostly criticizing BusinessWeek editor and interviewer Sarah Lacy’s approach toward the interview. Personally, having sat next to Daniel Terdiman of CNet, I heard (and understand) both perspectives after having liveblogged the entire event. Particularly, for me, Mark Zuckerberg’s responses were lacking of any substance and felt too “corporate.”? Brian Solis has written a very good piece on Sarah after spending hours speaking with her about the backlash.

(Photo credit: Brian Solis)

Here’s the edited version of the interview from a neutral perspective.

Last year, I ended 2006 with a great (and still pertinent) list of blog posts and articles that I felt were really the best in their class in the area of Internet Marketing. This year, I present you my favorite timeless posts of 2007, complete with descriptions about each blog post (which more than quadrupled the workload for me this time around, especially because I tripled the amount of links, but I had fun!) (Disclaimer: I’m certain that even with this list in excess of 250 links, I forgot a bunch of posts, so if you have any additional recommendations, please feel free to comment and I’ll add them!)

By the way, I still haven’t fully embraced video yet, so this will only include written articles. Maybe next year, folks!

Social Media Sites: General

• The Big Boys of Social Bookmarking: The Top 20 Sites (10e20): Chris Winfield ranks the top 20 social bookmarking sites by their Alexa rankings and gives a short description of what each does — in case you haven’t ventured beyond Digg.
• 24 Do-Follow Social Bookmarking Sites that Actually Work (Caroline Middlebrook): Get some powerful links on some of these lesser-known social sites.

Before we get back to the daily grind, I owe thanks to a few more people than those I mentioned yesterday.

First, I got this awesome package in the mail courtesy of the Ask.com team today.

I love it! Thanks so much, Erik, Patrick, Gary, and Jennifer!

Second, I wanted to thank the guys who helped me score some schwag at SES San Jose. I only featured people in my last post, but look what was inside my suitcase once I got home! Can you believe I managed this? I really don’t.

The individual photos have a lot of Flickr notes on them in case you were wondering who was giving out what.

In other news, I’m fortunate to have joined the Gawker team writing for probably one of my favorite blogs of all time, Lifehacker. It’s an incredible privilege to be part of such a wonderful team. Thanks for taking me on board!

And finally, as you may know, three of my pals started a tech-oriented podcast and I’ve been a guest on two of the shows. If you are interested in tech and social media news, check out The Drill Down. You’ll find me in episodes 3 and 6, but the others are pretty good too.

Ever since Digg opened its API, talented programmers have built a ton of tools that utilize Digg. Some of these tools monitor upcoming and popular stories. Others tell you about your account statistics and your circle of friends. Yet others allow users to browse stories, videos, and pictures in very unique and flashy ways. Here are twenty-nine tools, with some being lesser known than others, but all of them having some pretty significant purpose in the life of a Digger.

1. diggwatcher is a simple application built in Flash that runs in the background and monitors a single Digg story of your choosing. You can receive sound alerts when you get new Diggs, comments, and when your story becomes popular. The script refreshes every 60 seconds.

2. The Digg Noise Filter is a tool that will let you watch upcoming stories before they become popular… that’s if you don’t want to use the regular Digg upcoming tool. (Developed by Russ Jones)

3. Digg Entourage was also developed by Russ Jones and shows you who is in your Digg social circle by avatar and also in table format (number of stories Dugg, percentage of stories Dugg, and whether they’re your friend or fan):