Originally published at Social Web Daily

What do sculptors, jet setters, philosophers, foodies, and collectors have in common?

They can all make great use of Pinterest, the pinboard-channeling new social network. With a stream-lined interface, and plenty of opportunity to engage with and get inspiration from other Pinterest users, there are an endless number of creative ways to use the new site.

Here are five of our favorites:

1. Collector’s Showcase

Hobbyists and special-interest enthusiasts can put Pinterest to good use by uploading pictures from your personal collection, or collecting images from around the web. Whether you collect salt and pepper shakers, stamps, or just love the look of cupcakes, you can proudly display your special interests and hobbies using Pinterest.

2. Sage Scrapbook

If only we had a pen for every time someone said something insightful. Thankfully, Pinterest allows you to keep all those sage words of advice in one place. Great for philosophers, writers, or anyone who loves meditating on a thought-provoking quote, Pinterest is an ideal platform for storing inspiring quotes and categorizing them for an effortless pick-me-up anytime.

3. Digital Cookbook

Now we’re not sure about you, but our cookbooks are dog-eared, stained with pasta sauce and threatening to give at the seams. We’ve got recipes tucked away on notecards hiding among its pages only to disappear right when we need them (of course!). Finally, Pinterest lets us store all those recipes—and future dishes we find around the web—all in one easy-to-maneuver place. It’s a great spot to store grocery store lists, and entertaining tips as well.

4. Artist’s Muse

Don’t wait for the muse to strike—be proactive and fashion a Pinterest board to channel creativity. Pin your favorite art pieces, colors, lyrics, and photos to create a digital inspiration board. It might be exactly what you need to get that paintbrush moving.

5. Travel Itinerary

Let Pinterest help you plan your next trip. Whether you want to go to Bali, San Diego, or the Arctic, Pinterest can help you keep all of your travel dreams in one spot. Think of it as a beautiful digital bucket list of all the places you hope to one day go. You can pin articles about great restaurants, sights, and killer hotels. Plus, you can take pictures of your jaunts and pin ‘em up post trip.

How do you use Pinterest? Let us know in the comments below!

Even better, all images on Pinterest are links to whereever you found them, by default. So if you want to buy that cool pair of shoes your friend pinned, click through. If you want to see more info on an inspirational poster or what beach your friend took a photo of, click through.

When you create simple, yet limiting constructs as social media platforms, innovation will follow. Twitter has proven this, Instagram is on the same path, and the same applies to Pinterest.

When I asked the lovely Nicole D’Alonzo what she wanted for Christmas, she began to put together a list for me. But seeing as we both work in social media, she knew there had to be a social tool out there that was perfect for the task.

And Pinterest was a brilliant solution. You can browse all the potential gifts as images on one page, you can comment and like, as can Nicole or whoever created the list, and you can click through to get more info or buy the item.

Nordstrom is on Pinterest and in the holiday sprit with their Nordstrom Santa board. Bergdorf has a pretty actionable set of holiday gift boards including this “Gifts for Him” board that I have to say is pretty awesome. And plenty of other brands and people are finding cool and innovative uses for Pinterest, like a Dream Destinations board of places you want to visit or Whole Foods’ recycling board showing examples of people reusing everyday products.

Are you using Pinterest?

We definitely have an obsession with the pop culture of social media. It is just so much smiling-fun to read about, right?

If you are a social media professional, then we both know how precious your time is and how you do not have time to be on Twitter all day reading most of the crap all of us are guilty of putting out there.

Let’s take a look at some of the headlines that have been popular this week on Twitter. Some of these might sound like they are relevant to social media and your business:

• Why Groupon Is Poised For Collapse [Techcrunch]
• 10 Must-Follow Fake Twitter Celebs [Mashable]
• Facebook Expected To File For $100 Billion IPO This Year [Business Insider]
• Facebook Is Winning Silicon Valley’s Talent War [Fast Company]

Now there is nothing wrong with any of these websites or these specific articles. What gets us all in trouble is going on Twitter and Facebook looking to learn something and winding up reading ABOUT social media rather than LEARNING about social media.

The two rarely collide. And none of the above articles will teach you anything that can help your business today.

To be successful in using social media for your business, you do not have to know everything about the ecosystem. You do not need to know about viral videos or Twitter celebrities or the latest, greatest iPhone app.

If your goal is to waste a little time, build some relationships, and relax while watching the latest cat youtube videos, go for it. We all deserve that downtime.

But if you are consuming this type of content in the name of “learning social media,” I can now confirm for you, there is little actual learning happening on Twitter and Facebook, and you need to refocus your efforts.

This conversation is the sole reason I started the Social Fresh conferences 2 years ago. I was going to a ton of conferences for bloggers or for the internet or for tech enthusiasts. And no one was talking about what a business should be doing.

If you are looking to LEARN about social media, I recommend asking the question: “Is this teaching something I can implement today?”

At Social Fresh, we are creating an entire community based around a higher level of social media training for marketers. Based around training people can turn around and use right away. From THE industry experts.

We are all learning a little more about social media each day through Tweets and Facebook updates and Youtube videos. And spending time there is not the end of the world.

But it is always important to stop and ask ourselves how much of all this content is actually helping us with our business?

We launched with a nice traffic spike and then traffic fell off about 50% when the buzz subsided. This makes sense. No disappointment here. The site got a nice spike in traffic when we launched and this month is on track to do even more traffic than last month, with a more steady and growing traffic.

This is what I do not get. According to our WordPress.com Stats plugin, which uses Google analytics data, Facebook is one of our top 10 and most consistent sources of traffic. Close to 3,000 in the last 30 days.

I had a few thoughts as to why. We have about 200 likes for the main URL and scattered throughout the site, anyone can like any of the 350+ companies on the site, though most only have 0-2 likes. These are not big numbers, but I have noticed some of these pages showing up in Facebook search for some of these companies.

So my hypothesis is maybe that Facebook search was the source for the traffic. Or secondarily, people were sharing InvestInSocial.com with friends on Facebook. While I know that happens some, I did not think it would result in consistent traffic like this.

So next I went to Google analytics to see if I could dig up even more data on the source of this Facebook traffic. But I found something that is still confusing me. I am not an analytics ninja in any way, but I tend to be able to find insight in Google analytics when I am looking for it.

When I pulled up our referral traffic for the same 30 day period, Google said our traffic from Facebook was only 56.

Quite a large difference. And I really have no idea what the issue is. Our direct traffic is very high as well, so maybe that is the issue? Who knows. I am writing this post to see if anyone out there smarter than me has suggestions.

Moreover, I still have no idea where our Facebook.com traffic is coming from. Hopefully we figure it out and will have lessons to report to you soon.

A big piece of modern public relations is maintaining relationships with members of the media. Journalists, broadcasters, producers, editors, etc.

These relationships are the inside track that allows a PR firm to get a story to the front of the line for consideration. As opposed to waiting or hoping that word of mouth will carry a company or celebrity’s news through the labrinth of today’s news avalanche.

And the reverse is true. These relationships allow media outlets a trusted bullpen of sources of different topics. If they need experts or relevant comment on different sources, part of the playbook is to reach out to public relations professional for these sources.

Ok, enough of the preface. At this point I have basically described a professional networking custom that exist in many industries. In PR and media and journalism though, the result is much more public facing.

As PR transitions to include blogger outreach and beyond bloggers, new media outreach (Youtube stars, Twitter celebrities, etc), the rules are remarkably similar in many ways.

1. Find relevant media professionals that can help your client
2. Find relevant media professionals that you can help (Bonus if 1 & 2 are the same)
3. Build a mutually beneficial relationship
4. Nurture relationship

That word relationship is of course what we talk about a lot in social media. It is what we are talking about (or the lack of) when we complain about spam, or bad PR pitches, or brands that do not talk to us online.

In media relations, the behind the scenes social relationships are essential. Relationships are of course at the heart of most of the things we do in life. Giving value. Getting value. Nurturing the delicate tension between the two.

Media relations and new media relations can differ in scale I suppose. Today, some of the bloggers and Twitter users and forum admins we reach out to as marketers have communities that are quite small.

Of course, sometimes these are more relevant or niche than any print or broadcast audience traditional media relations could have ever hoped for. And sometimes, these communities are not so small.

The real difference is only eco-stystem. Learning the ins and outs of how to approach journalists and producers and editors is the learning curve. The skill set, the ability to build useful relationships, is the same. From public relations to social media, those that succeed for their clients in outreach are those that do well at building relationships.

Strengths on the social media company directory site, InvestInSocial.com, are consulting specialties in this case, client type, strategies, tactics, and platforms.

The 3 most mentioned words on their profiles were:

1. Facebook
2. Community
3. Twitter

Facebook and Twitter make a lot of sense as the largest and most talked about social networks. The word community was mentioned as part of “community management” mostly as well as community development.Training, content, and monitoring also had good showings.

To give you the full picture we took all the strengths and specialties mentioned for these listings and created this word cloud.

It is worth noting that this list of consultants is by no means a comprehensive list. But it is a broad representation. Many of the consultants on this list are industry leaders working with Fortune 100 companies. And just as many are beginners looking to provide community management skills for a business.

It has been said before that the term “social media consultant” has become almost useless because of it’s varied use by so many levels of experience. One of the ways we hope to change that is through this directory. By including strengths, work examples, and soon, confirmed recommendations from actual clients.

If you have not already, check out Investinsocial.com, the new social media company directory by Social Fresh, and let us know how we can continue to grow it into a better resource.

Update: Yes, this is a bit of an anti-social move. But it is what I needed to do to start getting more value out of Facebook personally. I am very open online and talk to people I have never met often, especially through Twitter. This is more about segmenting for me, and of course not for everybody.

More and more people are looking to make their Facebook experience more of a personal one. There is a lot of noise out there and Facebook can get pretty loud if you have not been very descerning about the friendships you have requested over the years (high school friends, coworkers, Farmville friends, etc).

If you have decided to start trimming your Facebook relationships, one of the next step possible steps is to limit who can add you as a friend in the first place.

I recently did this because most of the friend requests I get are for professional reasons. Most of these connections fall into three buckets: readers of my blog, people I meet at conferences, or people that hear me speak.

I want to keep my personal Facebook experience relevant but I also want to maintain these professional relationships since people were kind enough to show their interest.  The solution that was right for me was to hide my personal profile in search and to establish a professional page for myself where people can stay in touch with my social media writing and speaking.

Going through this process, I found out that hiding your personal Facebook profile form Facebook search was not very easy. I have gone to the trouble for you, so here is a simple step by step for how to hide your Facebook profile:

1. Find Your Privacy Settings

Login in to Facebook.com and click on “Account” and then “Privacy Settings” in the top right

2. Find Your Connection Settings

Click on “View Settings” under  ”Connecting on Facebook”.

3. Change Your Search Visibility

This top setting “Search for you on Facebook” is what will hide you in search results when other people try to find you. Set it to “Friends Only”.

It is importnat to note that “Your name, profile picture, gender and networks are visible to everyone”. So if someone does find your profile they will still see you are on Facebook. Additional settings on this page will allow you to control who can message you and request to add you as a friend.

You can leave your profile a little open so friends of friends can still message you and add you as a friend.

4. A Professional Page Option

Make sure when you name your professional fan page that you use your real name. Use your first and last name or whatever name people will mostly likely search for when trying to find you on Facebook.

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Image Source: Shutterstock.com

Bieber appeared on the Late Show Monday night, January 31st. Bieber’s tweets went out earlier in the day when the show tapes. And he was tweeting even more about the Late Show as the episode aired. Bieber has almost 7 million followers on Twitter. So that 10k is roughly .1% of his audience.

So all you have to do to get 10,000 Twitter followers in a day is… Nevermind. There is no real lesson here. It’s just pretty cool.

People love to bitch about there being an overabundance of social media consultants our there on the internet.

5 Reasons People Bitch About The Abundance Of Social Media Consultants

1. They think they are opportunists just out for quick money
2. They think they are talentless
3. They think they have no experience
4. They think they are annoying (pushy/egocentric)
5. They think they make the industry look silly

They are probably right. Well, mostly. Obviously we are not talking about Jason Falls, Tom Martin, Amber Mac, Jay Baer, Clay Hebert, and Paul Gillin. They do quality high level engagement stuff. Check them out.

But here is the thing.

Most of these “consultants” are never doing social media consulting.

How do I know? Because once upon a time… wait for it… I was a social media consultant.

Ok, are you done with all the dirty looks? Good. Moving forward.

So if they are not doing social media consulting then why do all these folks call themselves consultants and what are they really doing?

The term is ubiquitous because it makes sense. Most of the people in this category want to be able to get paid to help businesses with social media. The term is the simplest expression of that task.

The problem that becomes an immovable brick wall that many “consultants” run into — is that most companies do not want to pay for consulting. They do not want high level strategy or long term planning. They want to get their feet wet not swim the channel.

What ARE they ready for?

2 Things Companies Likely Want To Hire A Social Media Consultant For

1. Intro Training
2. Community Management

Basically you can translate those two things into “teach me about it” and “do it for me”. Where as most real consultants are instead providing long term research, strategy, guidance, and management of implementation. Most “consultants” are more often teaching companies about the tactics and culture of social medi or actually tweeting, Facebooking, and blogging on their behalf.

This makes sense considering how much of an education gap there is out there between social media talents and companies jumping into social media.

There is nothing wrong with this. If you have a passion for social media and time to commit. Why would you mind someone paying you to tweet on their behalf or to come in once a month and teach them a thing or two about this new space. This is both a good opportunity for both parties AND good experience to ultimately work your way up toward more substantive social media consulting.

When I decided to do social media consulting, I was escaping form the world of advertising and had some strategy background. However, most of my first few clients all wanted training and community management. If I had the time, I took those opportunities. And they helped me greatly.

So how can we improve the mood around the discussion of social media consultants?

Simple 3 Step Resolution To Hostilities

1. Encourage more correct labeling, such as “I do introductory social media training and Twitter management”
2. Realize that this is a big beautiful open ocean of an industry and that growing pains are inevitable. In other words, try not to bitch too much about it and let the industry evolve.
3. Encourage and promote those consultants, trainers, and independent community managers who are doing things the right way.

Image Credit: Shutterstock.com

My buddy Clay Hebert (http://twitter.com/clayhebert) just added Tennis to “Sport I Play” on my Facebook profile. Yes, you read that right. You can now (depending on privacy settings) add interests to your friends profiles (similar to how you can check them in to Facebook Places).

Clay was right. I do play Tennis. So I do not mind, but there will be some abuse here. However, it really opens up your Facebook profile. Your friends can now help define you or describe you in a big way. I can see people loving this, but more than likely most will hate the fact that it is opt out.

Update [12/5/10 18:50 EST]: In trying to replicate this it appears it only currently applies to sports. But this is clearly now a trend by Facebook of opening up your profile and activity to input from your social graph.

Update [12/5/10 19:30 EST]: If you want to try this out. Go to edit your new profile, add a sport, and Facebook will give you an option to add who you play the sport with.