I am very fortunate to be working with Alliance Tires Americas, Inc., a client in the agriculture industry; not only because they have wonderful products and are great folks, but because my own personal interests are satisfied. You see, my husband John and I have a family farm in west Tennessee. The farm has been in my husband’s family since 1870 but we are “new’ to the farming business.  So I am learning a lot from participating in forums and social media sites for Alliance Tire.  For example, I learned recently that because we have 100 acres or less we are considered “hobby farmers.”  That’s OK with me. We have a great deal to learn.

It may be a surprise to some of you that agriculture professionals and farmers in America are quite advanced in using social media and other public forum sites to promote themselves and their interests.  The Ag Chat foundation sponsors a question and answer session every Tuesday night from 7-9pm EDT using the twitter hashtag #agchat.  Almost every Farm Bureau offers classes teaching social media to their constituents.

Why?  Because farmers want you to know where your food comes from.  They want you to know the faces behind your gallon of milk or carton of eggs. Farming is not easy. It is hot, dirty, and expensive and totally under appreciated.  But individuals like Troy Hadrick and Advocates for Agriculture, and organizations like AEM, Association of Equipment Manufactures (AEM is looking for someone to recognize as the ‘Advocate for Agriculture” at their annual meeting.  Other examples on Facebook include: Indiana Dairy, Farmer Showcase and Farm Journal.

Do you know where your food comes from? Do you care? Who do you know that is a great “Advocate for Agriculture?” Tell us your story.  It is important!

My New Year’s Resolution is to change that.

Tamara Weinberg just gave us (for her birthday) a great list of the Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2009 and I am methodically re-posting each article on the JTMarCom Facebook FanPage. As I do that I am reading all the postings.

One posting from Louis Gray is:

40 Key Elements to Getting Started In Social Media

Tip number 5 is where I am starting.

1. Familiarize yourself with the basics of web-mastering. If you have not already done so, learn how to use FTP.

2. Learn the basics of HTML, and  the basics of  DNS how to configure it for your domain names. (How to Guide)

3. Learn how to configure a POP email account, and how to take a screen shot and edit and resize images.

The less you have to rely on someone for these basic tasks, the better off you will be and you might even save some out of pocket expenses.

I know you may know most of this but as I go through these list I always learn that I am not as smart as I think I am.

What do you want to learn or re-learn this year?

I don’t know about you but I try and provide helpful information to my Twitter followers. (@chrisgtaylor) Information that I find useful in my business and information that will help other people navigate the new media landscape. I am growing to like the term “new media” rather than “social media” because the more I learn the more “new” stuff there is to learn.

I also feel the “new ” label fits because we are seeing a dramatic shift in the way people do business. All the folks out there who call themselves gurus, experts, mavens are full of %$%&! There are just some people more ahead of the curve than others.

One such person is Young Yang from China. A Chinese man who is dreaming to be a professional full-time blogger. On Twitter @freenuts. I recently saw a tweet that peaked my interest and I went to his blog Free Nuts. What a wealth of information! What a nice guy. He also took the time to answer some questions I had.

He introduced me to Tweetbook . Tweetbook , is a FREE web app that lets you generate  a PDF eBook of all your tweets or favorites and share it to Twitter easily.

I am in the process of creating such a book for all of our clients.

You sign in with Twitter OAuth, to create your book. It can be down loaded or shared on ScribeD.

You can decide whether the PDF eBook will include the replies or not, you can generate a PDF eBook of your favorites, and you can download an XML file of the tweets or the favorites .

Besides downloading, you can share your PDF eBook to Twitter, so that your friends can see it on Tweetbook. The only problem….Tweetbook is so popular that it often reaches its maximum limit of users it can service at this time: so be patient.

Merry Christmas! We can now all be published authors.