Social networks have become the primary source of new content for many professionals trying to stay current in their field or to discover the latest insights. This is especially true for Internet Marketing professionals: we must constantly seek new opportunities for improvement while maintaining a thorough understanding of current tools.

Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ can offer access to a great deal of content. However, one must understand how to navigate and curate the billions of available tweets, posts, and viewpoints. Identifying and following your own group of experts will get you started.

Twitter is a fantastic way to gain a deeper understanding of who is really listening to whom:

This post comes from our Social Channel sponsor Full Sail University.

Last week I overheard a mom telling her toddler to “use your words.” They were in the store and the little guy was pointing at something he wanted. The mom guided him into using his words to tell her specifically what it was he wanted.

Words guide us through communication. They bring forth and maintain the integrity of our message.

If we simply point and hope that our audience knows what we want, we are leaving much of the interpretation up in the air. Instead, if we use our words to deliver an effective message, the words are doing the work.

As marketers, we must pay attention to the words we use to deliver our message.

Marketing Pilgrim’s Social Channel is sponsored by Full Sail University.

Gamification is the latest buzzword in marketing circles, as more and more companies are hoping to capitalize on the success of online social games.

However, before you run out and start planning your version of Farmville, it’s important to keep in mind that gamification is not just about creating a “game” – it’s about finding ways to interact with your customers and rewarding them for engaging with you. By creating an emotional connection with your customers, you can increase brand loyalty, referrals, and repeat business.

We all liked to play games as kids – from cards and board games to arcades and sports. We did so because it was fun, enabled us to socialize with our friends, and gave us a sense of accomplishment and status. The same is true for adults – hence the success of online games like Zynga’s Farmville and Mafia Wars.

Full Sail University is the sponsor of Marketing Pilgrim’s Social Media Channel.

It’s not news that marketing has made a huge shift to digital in the past 10 years. It’s also clear that many higher education institutions are still struggling to adapt their marketing curriculum to reflect the changing nature of the industry.

David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR, finds it so bad, in fact, that last year he went so far as to call many marketing professors criminals because they weren’t teaching up-to-date material in their classes.

That is unfortunate, because in this economy, there is [a] demand for talented and educated Internet marketers. Simply Hired Job Trends, for instance, show that job postings with ‘Internet marketing’ in the title have increased 180% since November 2009, while ‘social media marketing’ has grown 301%.