With all of the attention being paid to the various social media platforms out there, I'd like to draw some attention to the excellent iReporter social media platform. I've been posting to iReporter since the middle of last year, and I love the way it gathers up all of the posts that I've made on various sites so if I want to direct someone to read my work as a blogger, all I have to do is give them the web address and they can read my work. Because of the way the Internet is trending these days, social networking and social media marketing will become powerful forces in the worlds of commerce and marketing. That is, if the bloggers striving for social media optimization can avoid some of the main social media marketing pitfalls. You can create buzz around a product or a trend, but you have to be really subtle about it. Most people involved in social networking regard it as their "thing" and resent any attempts to commercialize it. But I think that the iReporter system amply serves my needs. I love being able to blog about various topics, from celebrity gossip to cars to politics and interesting new products. It's also really easy to use, very flexible, and allows you to post video and even set up streaming from a web cam if that's the way you like to blog. You can find iReporter on the Mogulling site (http://admin.moguling.com/), where all your questions about using it and getting started will be answered. It's a fun, easy, and supremely satisfying way to get into social media marketing.