Looking to work in social media marketing for some of the world's best brands? Know someone who would be perfect for it?

Ignite Social Media is hiring for a number of new positions made necessary by our continued growth. We've just hired a new director of strategic partnerships (more on that to come), but we're not done. In fact, we might just need you.

Do know that we're wildly picky (we have no choice), but if you've got rock-star potential in this business, we're ready to learn more about you. Take a look at the list below and figure out the position that fits your background and apply for it. Just be careful to follow the do's and don'ts at the end of the post.

As we move into a new year, we also are experiencing a shift in budgets towards social media, as well as how they are allocated in the social space. This is evident in Pepsi's decision to choose social media over Super Bowl ads, but it is also evident in our experiences with our own clients who are putting more resources and budget to ongoing social efforts.  In this post, I will acquaint you with some of the ways I think we'll see social media budgets changing over the course of 2010.

(Note: Most of the data used in this post comes from MarketingSherpa's "2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report", and from e-Marketer.  These two sites are great resources to see what other marketers are doing in this space and what portions of budgets are being allocated to social media marketing.)

2009 will surely go down as the year of the branded fan page on Facebook. Corporations woke up to Facebook as a powerful CRM-tool and a great way to jump start all sorts of related promotions.

So if 2009 is the year of the branded fan page on Facebook, who is in the lead in terms of most fans? With data from InsideFacebook.com, I crawled through hundreds of pages, pulling out the top 50 corporate, official, Facebook fan pages. Here are the top 50 branded Facebook Fan Pages of 2009.

If you've been wanting to read "Social Media is a Cocktail Party," but haven't yet sprung for $14.95 to get the physical book, it's been available on the Kindle for $9.99 for a couple of months now.

But with the holiday season and all, I thought it would be interesting to just give away the book on the Kindle. Lisa and I have always been more interested in sharing the content than making a small amount of money on the book, so why not. Yesterday, I tried to change the Kindle price to $0.00, but I got the error message pictured below. As a result, I did the next best thing, and lowered the price of Social Media is a Cocktail Party: Kindle Edition to $0.99. I'll leave it there for a while--maybe forever, maybe not--but for now, it's only 99 cents.

As the year draws to a close, I'd like to take a moment to reflect on some of the moments in social media and social media marketing that left me saying "uhhhhh... WTF?" Here are my top 10, though I'm sure there were plenty more.

Google Wave is Unveiled (Sort of)

One of the most anticipated launches in quite some time, it seemed like Google could do nothing but hit a home run with Google Wave. Unfortunately, what started out as a dazzling firework fizzled and popped like a plastic bag full of confetti. Sure it was nice, and did what it was supposed to do, but who is really using it? Who is excited about it? Not Robert Scoble, that’s for sure.

Yelp Turns Down Google

I imagine Yelp as just being that pretty belle at the dance who is waiting for her Prince Charming to sweep her off her feet before she’ll dance with anyone. But when King Google offers you more than a half billion dollars and still lets you keep the clothes on your back, you must know more than the rest of us. Hey Google, wave some of that scratch over my way, I’ll write some reviews.

Radian6, one of the primary social media monitoring tools we use at Ignite, recently launched a new feature: automatic sentiment analysis. As Christ Newton, Radian6 Founder and CTO, explains in his blog post: “Radian6 automated sentiment reviews on-topic posts as they come in, determines the sentiment of the post at the sentence level, and aggregates a positive, negative, or neutral designation at the post level based on specified sentiment keywords and phrases.”

I should mention that Radian6 continues to be one of our primary tools at Ignite. The noise filtering is second to none, and we should know – we are tracking some very “noisy” keywords for our clients. So, while we consider the addition of sentiment analysis to Radian6 to be a great bonus, we would have continued to use their service even without it.

Opening Skepticism

Our social monitoring guru at Ignite, Brian Chappell, has often questioned the accuracy, and therefore, usefulness, of automatic sentiment analysis, typically done with what’s called Natural Language Processing. Without a trained human actually reading each and every post, the ability of these systems to accurately mark a post as Positive, Negative or Neutral in regard to a specific brand or product mention is not very strong. However, the goals of sentiment analysis and trending the general sentiment about a brand or product over time is a very worthy one, especially for a social media agency like Ignite as we try to move the relevant needles for our clients and report on that growth.

When I read the first few chapters of Bob Gilbreath's "The Next Evolution of Marketing: Connect with your customers by marketing with meaning," I could relate with every word. After all, a lot of the advice aligns perfectly with the basics of what we do every day in social media marketing, including:

• "What if we started over? What if we threw out the textbooks and the flowcharts and rose above the snazzy jingle, the celebrity bribe, the empty sizzle, and the ad accost? What if we stopped trying (and failing) to be all things to all people and instead tried to create something of meaning? What if we stopped interrupting people to tell them how great our products are and actually did something to prove our greatness?"
• "Ninety-nine percent of people say that consumer-generated online reviews are 'very or somewhat credible.'"
• "Marketing as we have known it for decades is no longer sustainable in its current form... While we could once rely on a steady stream of sales with a continuous flow of ad dollars, advertising as it is practiced today is viewed as a noisy negative externality pushed onto people we are meant to serve. And our sales results, brand value, and career prospects are suffering."

Working for a social media agency  has shown me first-hand how companies adopt new mediums.  The first phase seems to be that of denial - that these new fangled inventions can be ignored until they pass.  The second phase is that of casual acceptance, and in social media this is when you see companies cordially place "Follow Us" in emails and other existing website materials to almost prove why social media marketing isn't working for them. 

And now I'm afraid I am witnessing a third newly emerging phase: the use of social media as a condiment.

In the following points, let me explain the 4 myths that are often involved in this line of thinking.

Myth #1: Social Media is an after-thought

More and more, companies are approaching agencies like ours to help figure out social media and what it can do.  The only unfortunate part of this is that most approach us after they have developed a campaign, and they are seeking us to throw our special social sauce on it in a matter of weeks or days.  At this point we feel there isn't much we can do (even with our special sauce).  This is because in our opinion, something inherently social has to be thought-of from the very beginning.  So, if you are thinking of a campaign that you'd like to promote through your Twitter and Facebook account - allow enough lead time to answer simple yet crucial questions like, "Why would someone want to share this?".  You may find that you have a campaign that may be compelling to you but no one else, and will find it more beneficial to go back to the drawing board.

A couple of days ago, Steven Baker of Business Week published "Beware Social Media Snake Oil," warning that "hordes of marketing 'experts' are promoting the value of wikis, social networks, and blogs."

Since I run one of the nation's largest social media agencies (and help some of the world's largest brands with social media marketing), people asked me what I thought of it. It's not an answer I can condense to a tweet. So here goes:

1) He's right

His primary point was that there are too many shysters, too many speechmakers, too many pontificators, that sell social media as a panacea. Even Baker says in the subhead that "all the hype may obscure the real potential of these online tools." Social media is powerful enough, you don't need to oversell it.

With the holidays looming just around the corner, and us being the internet lurking folk that we are, I’m pretty sure that we all capitalized on good deals and got our Cyber Monday on. But just in case you didn’t get a chance to fulfill the wish list for all of your nerdy social media compatriots yet, here’s a list of some “Web 2.0” themed gifts that will have them all a-Twitter. Hahaha!

Just for fun, I have carefully curated this list of unique and wallet-friendly social media themed gifts for your perusal. Just click on the photos to be taken to the product page and if you're shopping for me, I am @oliviahayes, and I look good in blingy necklaces. By the way, if you ever want to truly experience the greatest in human creativity, please spend some time browsing Etsy.