I believe we should all seek to do something meaningful with our lives. While paying the bills is essential, we should try to pursue something that we truly get excited about and enjoy doing on a daily basis. We should try to impact the world in a positive way, even if in a small way.

I’m personally passionate about the convergence of technology, marketing, and the social web. I feel like a huge nerd reading the sentence I just wrote, but it’s true. I like to think, learn, and talk about those three things as much as I enjoy playing sports and listening to music. It’s how I’m wired. If you’re reading this, you might be wired like that too.

So this is a short version of the story of how I went from being a social media participant to a social media content producer to a social media manager, in less than one year…

Up until two and a half weeks ago, I was a tech and business consultant. For the three years prior to that, I had been a consultant with a promising career. I had worked on challenging and interesting projects concerning innovative mobile web sites, IT cost-reductions and, my favorite, identifying social media opportunities for communications service providers.

It was going pretty good. However, my interest in social media was growing. I found myself thinking about the rapidly changing social web on a daily basis. I read blogs like TechCrunch and magazines like AdAge. I listened to podcasts like Buzz Out Loud and kept up with the latest in social media thanks to people I had started to get to know as friends (instead of followers) on Twitter.

I was fascinated by all things social on the Internet and I wanted to further explore the future of the web. I needed a creative outlet. I needed a new “home base.” (more…)

Becca Taylor is a Social Media Manager at HP’s Enterprise Business, which focuses on servers, storage, business and IT software/services, and other B2B technologies. On the 32nd episode of “The Social Nerdia Show!,” I had a conversation with Becca and she told me about her role at HP, what the company is doing in the social media world, and her thoughts on community, participation, and personal branding.

Listen to the entire conversation with Becca on the Flash player below. You can also subscribe to us on iTunes, stream from mobiles on Stitcher, and listen to upcoming shows LIVE on blogtalkradio.

HP is a very large company with over 150,000 employees. “The larger the company gets, often, the more difficult it is to really get authentic social media engagement running,” Becca explained. She added that the benefits of social media in business-to-consumer offerings is much more clear than it is in the B2B realm, but her team is helping change that within HP by identifying the value to the company and its customers.

Her team is called “The Social Media Enablement Team” and consists of 6 people with different roles and in different locations. “Our goal is to work with different teams within the division to get them up to speed on the tools, and most of all, understand from a business perspective that they need to approach social media marketing as they would approach any marketing program, with deliberation, responsibility, and objectves,” Becca said.

Becca has been with HP for 10 years. She actually started at Compaq (which was acquired by HP) doing web documentation. She then transitioned into marketing where she “focused on customer advocacy, on how to best use the internet and various tools to enhance the customer experience.”

About a year ago the Enterprise Business division created a team that focused on social media, and Becca was one of the few who joined the team. “I’m thrilled I did,” she told me, “because I love my job. It’s the best job I’ve ever had.” (more…)

Ryan Paugh is the co-founder and community manager of Brazen Careerist, a career management tool for next-generation professionals. Ryan and I had a great conversation on the 26th episode of The Social Nerdia Show! live podcast.

We talked about his transition from the corporate world to entrepreneurship, Generation Y, the job market, and the social way to manage your career. Ryan also gave some great tips for those interested in becoming online community managers.

You can listen to the interview in its entirety on the Flash player below, by subscribing to the podcast on iTunes, and by streaming it live every Thursday night on blogtalkradio.

The current state of the job market is not exactly exciting. With the stock market slowly recovering to 1999 levels and a high unemployment that is truly worthy of a ‘Great Recession,’ there are still some good news. I’m serious. First of all, companies are starting to hire again and everyone is a bit more optimistic about the future. Second,  people are becoming much more willing to connect online and recommend others for positions.

And that’s why Brazen Careerist is a site you need to check out, especially if you’re young. While Monster and CareerBuilder are good to browse for countless of too-good-to-be-true and questionable positions, and LinkedIn is the place to share your resume with an established network, Brazen Careerist “helps you build your network,” as Ryan told me. He also pointed out that “young professionals don’t have a lot of experience and connections, and they need a place to build those connections online.”

Getting a job has a lot to do with who you know. Social networks can definitely help. From connecting with old high school friends to getting to know your current friends even better, social networks are becoming an extension of who we are and a map of who we know. As we learn to collaborate better with others online, a collaborative approach to career management makes sense. Ryan said it quite well: ”Collaboration for your career management is something new. Traditionally, it was something very competitive, but it’s not the best way to do it. At Brazen Careerist we encourage people to have that idea sharing mentality, it’s a Web 2.0 mentality. We’re sharing instead of hoarding information for ourselves.” (more…)

DandyID is a service that allows you to collect your various online selves. Because DandyID supports over 320+ services (including the obvious ones like Twitter and Facebook, and more than enough random ones like Wakoopa and Tioti), you should be able to fully collect yourself and share this information with others via your public profile.

DandyID also provides you with a “Social Rank“, a percentile system calculated from the number of sites you exist on compared to all DandyID users. In addition, there are a few tools you can use to better share your profile and discover users’ identities online (including a Wordpress plug-in, Blogger widget, a FireFox plug-in, and Squidoo module). In order to incentivize developers to create more add-ons, DandyID is having a contest.

DandyID’s brand new features (released today)

• The new service verification feature allows you to verify that you really are the owner of your profile on Twitter, Brightkite, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook (and more in the near future). This in turns connects your verified profiles with your DandyID profile so you can gain control over your accounts and others can know that you are.. you. (more…)

Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success is a solid, relevant, timely, and easy-to-read book about personal branding. It is targeted at young adults, but people of different ages in the following 3 groups might enjoy it: 

1. Anyone who is confused or clueless about today’s internet
2. Anyone interested in bettering themselves in the ‘workplace’
3. Anyone interested in learning more about social media and marketing

I personally believe that most young adults should already know much of what makes up this book, but since that is not the case, I’m glad that someone from my generation actually got a book published on the topic. The book is well-organized and it has a lot of insightful and practical information.

Many older people would probably greatly benefit from this book, but unfortunately, some of them will not take it very seriously. The fact that the author is young might make him seem less than credible to someone who has ‘paid his dues’ and often buys self-help books at FedEx Kinko’s. Such a person might not know what to make of Wordpress, podcasts, or Twitter. On the other hand, to a 25 year-old tech-geek with a marketing degree, such as myself, Dan seems approachable, tech-savvy, and normal.

And as the Miami Herald put it, Dan’s youth gives him a “competitive edge“. 

(more…)