What social media resources have you found to be invaluable? What resources would you recommend to your peers?

During interviews with social media leaders at more than 20 educational institutions, members of the CASE social media task force asked these two questions as part of an effort to begin developing a list of tried-and-true, peer-endorsed resources for advancement professionals who are either just stepping into or already working in the social media arena.

For staying on top of social media trends, tips and resources, interviewees suggested:

• Mashable
• Hubspot
• edSocialMedia
• copyblogger
• Seth Godin’s blog and Twitter feed

Suggested tools for tracking, aggregating and managing social media, include:

• Hootsuite, which is “useful to manage a group of people and assign permissions, update accounts,” according to an interviewee
• TweetDeck, a Twitter aggregator
• Google Reader, “helps monitor what is said about brand”
• Google alerts, email updates of recent Google results based on terms and topics
• Addict-o-matic, an aggregator of Web content by topic
• Digg, a tool to identify and share Web content
• Tweeter, a Twitter Interface that allows users to post new tweets through Facebook
• RSS feeds, “invaluable in terms of cross-pollinating multiple accounts from the institutional website”

A couple of respondents suggested checking out:

• Clay Shirky’s “How social media can make history”
• The Cluetrain Manifesto

Some of the survey participants stay tuned to social media trends by scanning what’s going on at other institutions and by relying on the expertise of on-campus colleagues. Others mentioned growing their skills and knowledge by attending face-to-face and online social media conferences. And one enterprising participant follows a self-developed list of 350 Twitter feeds by experts in the field, noting that they often include to links of case studies and helpful articles.

What would you add to the list?