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…)

If you’re on Twitter, you’ve probably heard of Tweetsgiving (which starts today!) and the Twitter Kids of Tanzania. In last night’s The Social Nerdia Show! I had an awesome conversation with Stacey Monk, founder of Epic Change, the non-profit organization behind Tweetsgiving that “invests in people with incredible stories“. It was easy to see that Stacey’s heart is as big as her dreams to make a difference the world.  Her story is quite powerful and so is the story of those that her organization is helping and working with.

Listen to the entire conversation with Stacey 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.

“We believe there are incredible people across the globe that are creating change in their own community; we try to amplify their visibility and impact,” explained Stacey about what drives Epic Change. Tweetsgiving was a project that Epic Change “imagined six days before American Thanksgiving in 2008 with six volunteers, and launched only 48 hours before Thanksgiving.”

The Tweetsgiving idea was simple: ask people to share about what they were thankful for and ask them to donate to the project if they felt moved to do so. The result was over $10,000 in donations that were invested to build a classroom at a school founded by Tanzanian Epic Change fellow “Mama Lucy” Kamptoni, a woman who used her own money to open up a school that today serves more than 300 kids.

The Twitter handles of those who made donations were painted in the room so it is no coincidence that Twitter and the “@” symbol have become quite popular in the school in Tanzania. These days, Mama Lucy and the kids have become passionate users of the microblogging platform and you can follow them yourself here. ”They do not yet have a library, but they access to a world of information!,” Stacey said with much excitement about the kids’ access to the internet, which has been made possible thanks to a recently donated Technology Lab.

The goal for Tweetsgiving 2009 is much larger than that of 2008 and Stacey told me that it includes building a library, a cafeteria, and a dorm for the kids in Tanzania. (more…)

Everyone’s been talking about oneforty, a Twitter marketplace of sorts that was announced by Laura Fitton (”Twitter for Dummies” author) earlier today, and the buzz is well deserved. After a quick beta sign-up, a couple of emails and a long list of Terms of Service, the oneforty lets you into what may be the first decent Twitter app collection (or “outfitter“) out there.

oneforty is currently tracking about 1350 apps/services/shorteners/clients (and growing) with detailed info about each one, including press mentions, related tweets, and sometimes even screenshots. It even gives the ability to donate to the developers.

The site’s best feature is the easy-to-use reviewing system (1-5 star rating), which I’m assuming is what drives the “most popular” list that includes well-known services like Bit.ly, Tweetie and TwitPic. No surprises in the popularity list (same goes for the “essential”/recommended apps), but the idea of finding new services  is what will motivate users to check out a Twitter marketplace.

Here are 10 apps that I didn’t know about until I checked out oneforty:

TwitBlock (for Spam Blocking) helps you analyze a specific account to see if it is a “bot or not.” It also lets you find out if your followers are displaying signs of “spamminess.” This is useful since we all know that spammers are alive and well on Twitter. The coolest thing though is to try to see if any of your real friends are part-time spammers. My only problem with TwitBlock is that it is slow (too slow) and doesn’t let you easily block.

Who Should I Follow? (for finding new people) helps you identify people you might be interested in following. I was skeptic about this one, but the resuts were pretty good and seemed to combine people that had similar interests, followed the same people or lived nearby. Still, I’m not so sure the site deserves to have “should” as part of its name and it doesn’t help much with the following since I wasn’t able to do that without having to go to Twitter.

TwtPoll (for surveying) helps you create polls, along with a temporary short url like this one: http://twtpoll.com/3zvbti . The site lets you select different kinds of questions and determine vote allowances, and lets respondents retweet, comment and share elsewhere. (more…)

Chris Kahle is a recently hired copywriter for Crispin Porter + Bogusky, one of the hottest ad agencies in the world. While I cannot pronounce “Bogusky” very well, I’m quite aware of the agency’s widely known work for Hulu, Microsoft, Guitar Hero and Burger King.

 ”Boulder’s great. For a town out of about ninety thousand, it’s got a lot going on,” Chris said to me about the city in Colorado where CP+B is headquartered. It must be especially great to be there right now considering the fact that Chris was out of  a job just a few months ago when he decided to use Twitter to get CP+B’s attention. 

“I kind of became a victim of the recession 3 months ago. I got laid off from the agency that I was working at in Vancouver… Being liberated by being laid off, I had free reign to do what I want,” Chris explained. And working at an agency like CP+B is what Chris wanted to do so he got in touch with them. He had some contacts within the agency, but he wanted to increase his chances at standing out from the crowds (especially since so many people apply to CP+B on an on-going basis).

So Chris came up with the idea of asking people to tweet about him and his RFE (Request for Employment) to co-chairman Alex Bogusky and interactive creative director Jeff Benjamin. “I made a list of the few Twitter influencers in the advertising world, and I sent them messages saying ‘Can you guys tweet my RFE to CP+B?’ and for each person that sends this tweet I’ll give a dollar to charity.” (more…)

Version 0.3 of Seesmic Desktop, the Adobe Air client for Facebook and Twitter, has just been released andshould auto-update. In addition to  nice user interface improvements (like a “cancel” button to erase messages), here’s a summary of what’s new:

• Multi-Account Posting with Smart Account Enabling: Helps you better manage various accounts and not have to worry too much about which one you’re posting from.
• Authenticated bit. ly Integration: Use your own bit. ly account for to keep track of your URL shortened links.
• Integrated Account Services Panel: Gives you the ability to use image services such as Pikchur , Posterous, TwitPic, Twitgoo, yfrog, and more in the future.
• Facebook improvements: Easily add comments to your friends posts and status updates.

(more…)