This year has been challenging but it also offered many opportunities for professional growth. Below are five things that I learned in 2009 and wanted to share with you:

Take advantage of free stuff – Many companies, including BurrellesLuce, Listrak, and HubSpot offer wonderful webinars. If your schedule permits, sign up! I’ve learned how to use Facebook as a marketing tool, how to use press releases to drive social media, how to measure social media–and much more—all for free.

Make friends with Lynda – At www.lynda.com, you’ll find online training courses in a multitude of topics. I took the excellent “Twitter Essentials” course and I’m also planning to take the course on “Flickr Essentials.” The very reasonable fee is good for the entire month, meaning that you can view as many modules as you’d like in that time period.

Hooray for Hootsuite – Currently, I’m managing five Twitter accounts for clients and Hootsuite makes them remarkably easy to monitor. Each account is tabbed for quick access and, in my opinion, the white background is much easier to read than the black background on another popular platform.

Create rich content that begs to be shared – Whether you are tweeting, posting or blogging, make your content highly share-worthy. If you benefited from a PowerPoint presentation on SlideShare or a hashtag conversation such as #Journchat, pass along the link and others will do the same. Jeff Majka (@jmajka), says that content MUST be educational, engaging and entertaining (all three) for maximum share-ability.

Long live the news release – Some say the press release is becoming extinct, but isn’t the press release the foundation of a PR toolkit? Commenters to a recent article by Vanessa Horwell maintain that there’s always a place for a well-crafted NEWS release. Journalists, bloggers, tweeters and Web site editors still need compelling, jargon-free, consumer-friendly content that tells a story. So the trusty tool isn’t being tossed, just sharpened and honed for even better functionality.

Until next time,
Sara Hunt
Twitter ID: @sarahunt