Eating my own dog food about why pointing to other people’s content is a good thing to do, here are my favorite three posts from the week.  They either made my life easier or my work better.  To their authors who say true, I say thankya.

Enjoy and please put your own favorites into the comments. 

1. Truth is in the Eye of the Monitor. Over at Social Media B2B, Adam Holden-Bache uncovers “7More B2B Social Media Tools You Haven’t Heard Of. Most of them are monitoring tools, which may spur you to think, “but I’ve already got one.”  But there’s the beauty of it.  Since these services all measure and display results in slightly different ways, your understanding of how channels interact and conversations flow goes up exponentially when you start comparing them.  It’s also a good reality check for when you start thinking your dashboard is conveying some absolute truth instead of merely a version of truth.

2. Products as Community Members??? The Social CMO picked up a great video of Robert Bowman of Supply Chain Brain interviewing Jeff Ashcroft of Supply Chain Network.  At first I was thinking, ‘social media for supply chains?’  Sure, you often think of business partners as one of the stakeholders to be communicated with via social, but usually in a thought leadership way.  This level of integration represents a whole new level of usage, especially when Jeff throws out the idea that RFID tags can communicate with you via social media.   It’s just eight minutes and worth the watch.

3. You’re Free, They’re Free, It’s free. Mitch Joel at the TwistImage blog telegraphs everyone reminding them that right now social media tools are cheap and easy to try out.  Historically it hasn’t been that way for new media channels, but many marketing departments still behave as if any new effort will cost millions of dollars and therefore should take a year to carefully consider.  I agree!  Do small experiments.  Promote the idea that failure, if it leads to learning, is really success.  Here’s an excerpt from his post, “You Are Free to Try Everything:”

“Most brands still face the whole analysis/paralysis syndrome when it comes to Digital Marketing and Social Media. There is so much choice and opportunity that they wind up doing nothing, little or struggle with whatever it is they’re currently engaged in. We need to be trying more things and we need to stop getting hung up on the technology.”