As I am searching for good sites or blogs about social media, I found that a lot of them are concentrating on marketing area. These marketing-how topics are certainly trendy and handy as social media is becoming the battle for new marketings, especially for small business. However, I felt them too practical and narrowed for us to read in order to gain a bigger picture of social media. Thus, I gathered the following channels (or platforms!) besides Mashable and ReadWrite, hoping them be of help for us to get a better understanding of social media.
The sequence doesn’t imply any ranking intention.
Social Media Examiner is a very big and successful blog writing about marketing on social media – but its not only about marketing. They have good tips on how to better use SNSs such as Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter, in the form of text blog or podcast. As we are really managing our online identity and personal brands, which is somewhat similar to small business (well, tiny business), some of these tips could be good reference for us to utilize our SNS accounts.
2. FastCompany
Though FastCompany is not a site that dedicated to social media per se, it offers good source of information regarding pulse of companies that relates to social media. As nowadays a plethora of IT companies are involved with social media to some degree, you can always discover useful and real-time information about social-media strategies of those big companies, especially under its Technology section. I often found these posts resonated well with principles we read from the class while added more practical flavor to them. For example, I read a post yesterday analyzing why Facebook and Yahoo! were that interested in Foursquare, which vividly illustrated why “data is the Intel inside” in Web 2.0 age.
3. Soshable
Soshable is actually the kind of blogs that I originally wanted to see when I was seeking for social-media-related blogs. It is a space hosts posts from different bloggers, covering different topics related to social media, including tips for everyday life on SNSs, news on Web 2.0 tycoons such as Google and Twitter, or features of different SNSs. It’s not hard to find useful information for your own targets.
And it has a funny reason to choose such a font in their header section, which almost turned me away from it at the first sight…
Hope you enjoy these resources and share your discovery with me.
EMMA DONG 
Very nice picks!