Given how quickly social media tools change, we are marveling at the fact that a UK school is now offering a degree program in social media. For a mere $5700, you can learn how to use Facebook,Twitter and more. You will even learn how to write a blog or create a podcast. We do have to give credit where credit is due: at least the university is making money off of social media. The social media companies certainly aren't.

Now if this were a degree in Social Media Marketing, or crowd-sourced product development, we would be all for it. After all, real jobs exist that require those skills. Unfortunately, this course seems more like something designed to give you basic competence in the world. Sort of like learning how to use e-mail.

So what do we have? Coursework that teaches you how to use tools that are easily self-taught, based on technologies that will evolve and may be obsolete by the time you graduate. OK. Good luck with that!

These days, you can’t read anything without coming across a mention of Twitter. If only Twitter could monetize word-of-mouth they’d be IPO-worthy today. And yet, there you are, a marketer, shaking in your boots because you have no idea how to start with all of this.

Oh, you know there is plenty of advice out there. You’re no fool. You’ve been reading blogs. You have googled expert tips. You even signed up for a Twitter account (@cluelessnewbie) a month or two ago. But every time you see that “What are you doing?” you are paralyzed. Why would anyone care what you had for lunch today? And are you actually interesting enough for people to follow you? How self-obsessed do you have to be to constantly want to say what you are doing? Is Twitter populated with narcissists?

And then, you read an article like this one about the different types of Twitter personalities and you get even more anxious. There are styles? Some of them undesirable? I don’t want to annoy people!

Don’t worry. Reframe the question. Instead of answering “What are you doing,” answer this: “What do you find interesting today?” If you found it interesting, someone else probably will too.

Still worried about narcissism? Think about this gem we heard at an excellent panel (Is Aristotle on Twitter?) at the SXSW conference: if someone complains about something you tweet, THAT person is the narcissist for having assumed it was intended for him.

To misquote President Lincoln: You can entertain some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not entertain all of the people all of the time.

See? No worries. Go ahead: Step into the Twitter stream. It’ll be OK.

And if it brings you any comfort – everyone else goes through the same process. (See the 5 stages of Twitter acceptance.)

The SXSW Interactive conference brought together thousands of people who love technology so much that they were willing to spend a weekend and then some in Texas to talk about it. (OK, they also love the parties and the social scene that go along with it, but still, these are serious technophiles.)

And how do all of those people want to communicate with each other? Twitter, of course. So, great idea, we use the hashtag #sxsw so anyone can search for related tweets. Only one small problem. In the time it took to write this paragraph, during the interactive conference there would have been hundreds of tweets.

Since interactive is over, and it’s now the music & film conferences, many of the hard-core twitterers are gone. (Just 40 results since typing the #sxsw hashtag above.) Nonetheless, the Twitter fire hose is spewing at a pace faster than most can manage. (44 results now)

Who can keep up with this? Absolutely no one. And now we have the challenge: scalability of social media. (50 results) How do we avoid #overload FAIL? (57 results) The magic word? “Filtering.” Not that the perfect filtering solutions exist yet. But they will.

For example, check out the new Facebook redesign. (79 results) You might not like it right now (like so many vocal others), but did you know that you can create a group of just the people you want to hear about it? And, you can make that group the default for your own news feed. (82 results)

Now that’s useful. (92 results. Have you caught up yet? Need to filter those tweets?)

Here at Digital Axle, we like to keep things fair. This means a lot of things: no pushing or shoving in the kitchen, lots of leg space in our conference room for the extra tall people, the right to use or not-use-and-openly-despise Twitter, and early exit for all on Friday afternoons. Provided you are not a lowly minion, of course.

For you, dear blog reader, it means we want to make sure you hear the other side of the internet advertising story. We mostly bombard you with uplifting news about how online ad revenues are growing faster than a Jersey tomato in summer, surpassing other mediums because of its broad (yet targeted!) reach and superior ability to measure ROI. We post eMarketer charts every month whose long red rectangles show the bright future of the industry and its projected revenues.

But not everyone thinks like us. Read this post by Eric Clemons of the Wharton School, "Why Advertising is Failing on the Internet." If nothing else, it will get you thinking about the future — in which we may or may not be wearing shades.

Whoops, didn't mean to do THAT, said the dude from One Show –one of the premier awards shows for advertisements– when he slipped and accidentally emailed the spreadsheet that listed all of the entries (and how much they paid) for the 2009 awards to a handful of agency execs.

Too late, it's out, and Ad Age reports that apparently, even in tough times, agencies are willing to shell out quite a bit for a chance at recognition and industry fame. Total # of entries, excluding interactive & design? 9,795 — with an average cost of $358 each, pulling in $3,507,860 for One Show.

Ad Age estimated also that considering how many entries they received the year before (26,000), the organization got about $10 million in entry fees. One Show's response: We are a nonprofit, and agencies realize that this money goes towards supporting the industry.

BBDO was the hungriest hippo, accounting for more
than 750 of the entries – spending a total of more than
$250,000, according to the spreadsheet.

It's not the sexiest topic, but it's got to be addressed. Search marketing is the rising star of this century, but it's also one of the most poorly misunderstood online marketing tactics. Without naming names, or should I say taking names, clients sometimes just don't get what it is, what they want to do with it, and what they can (reasonably) expect from a search marketing campaign.

Along comes Josh at Search Engine Watch, to unravel the mystery of how to discuss search with clients.

Some of the highlights:

• Develop a unified search strategy. Don't compartmentalize your approach
  because you have a paid search team and an SEO team. Many clients and
  agencies still try to keep these strategies separate…Begin with meetings, status calls, and sharing keyword lists. This gets
  the conversation going and forces the groups to work together
  cohesively.
• Local search is important for everyone. Locations, phone numbers, services offered, hours of operations, and reviews add relevancy to your listing for brand searches and
  service-related searches.
• Social media strategies definitely can be used for SEO benefit, so don't be afraid to
  poke around your client's social media plans and ask to be included…As long as you're thinking about it from the context of search and not
  as a way to steal business, this is a valuable conversation to have,
  and your client will welcome it.

Mobile marketing is going to become a mass channel in 2009, helped along by the recession — and marketers would do good by getting into it while it's still new, advises Marc Fleishhacker, managing director for Ogilvy, New York.

The firm has published a little somethin' called "21 Ogilvy Solutions," suggestions for
clients who want, no, NEED, to get the best performance
of their marketing budgets. It's part of a larger help section in their Nov' 08-launched site called Ogilvy on Recession.

Why mobile, though?

The level of saturation
in the marketplace in terms of handset distribution, with the younger
generation who are ready adopters of mobile getting older every year,
is driving up the food chain, said Fleishhacker. Some 57% of the U.S. population is texting on a
regular basis and there is 100 to 110 year-on-year growth in the SMS channel, he added.

Mobile advertising now is a relatively cheap, so why not start using it as a channel, he said. Measurement and analytics tools are better now than they were in past recessions, so you'll get better feedback on your campaigns.

Sure, they’re sweet, and colorful — and who doesn’t love that? (Though apparently that was the criteria for The Bachelor’s first choice, which he later rejected, big time.)

 The Mars company scrapped its old website for a brand spankin’ new social media site, which as Andy Beal describes it, is basically an overlay of search.twitter.com
displaying results for the term “skittles,” plus a few other navigational tools to point visitors to Skittles presence on YouTube and Facebook. It’s a portal for social media freaks, who are also really into the little round candies. I would not be surprised to find a large number of people who fit that criteria.

Now the question is, will it work? And by work, I guess I mean increase sales, since after all Skittles is a company just like the rest of us (and the best of us?).

Sure, it provides them with a direct connection with their
customers, and gives the brand a steady stream of authentic user-created content, but it’s still an experiment — so we won’t know for a while what the actual results are. Many bloggers gave rave reviews, if for no other reason than to applaud them for keeping it fresh, putting social media content first, and getting people’s attention.

I personally did not get past the first overlay, which asked me my birthday, and I assume it’s not to put in a “happy birthday from skittles” email database. So, I went no further. Did you? What is your gut reaction to this gutsy move from a huge brand?