This is a post I have published on Mashable.com. Hope you enjoy it. If you’re headed out on Black Friday, may it help you.

We’re a week away from Black Friday and just a few years ago, if you wanted to find the best deals, you had to wait for the sales flyers to hit your newspaper or mailbox. You’d make a list of what you wanted and get your game plan together. But that’s all changed because of social media. Tools like iPhone apps, blogs, Twitter, and Facebook will be key in helping competitive shoppers get a leg up against the thousands of shoppers vying for the deals of the century this season. And with holiday spending projected to be down 3% from last year’s low numbers, stores are doing whatever they can to make it easier for shoppers to spend their money with them.

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Susan Payton is the Managing Partner of Egg Marketing & Public Relations, an internet marketing firm. She blogs at The Marketing Eggspert Blog, and teaches marketing courses at Marketing EggSchool. Follow her on Twitter @eggmarketing.

We’re a week away from Black Friday and just a few years ago, if you wanted to find the best deals, you had to wait for the sales flyers to hit your newspaper or mailbox. You’d make a list of what you wanted and get your game plan together. But that’s all changed because of social media. Tools like iPhone apps, blogs, Twitter, and Facebook will be key in helping competitive shoppers get a leg up against the thousands of shoppers vying for the deals of the century this season. And with holiday spending projected to be down 3% from last year’s low numbers, stores are doing whatever they can to make it easier for shoppers to spend their money with them.

Blogs and Websites

Weeks before Black Friday, blogs and websites like Black Friday 2009 and BlackFriday.info have been uploading sales flyers from every store imaginable to help shoppers plan out their attack on the biggest shopping day of the year. For gadget-lovers, Gizmodo’s #blackfriday feed has the latest posts about the best electronic deals to be had.

Mom-related blogs and forums, such as MomsLikeMe, a geography based networking site, or Triangle Mom2Mom, focus on the strategies for what to do with the kids when shopping on Black Friday, local sales and events, and advice on how to stretch that dollar even farther.

The benefit to blogs is that they are updated constantly, with deals being posted every day. Find one or two you like and subscribe to their RSS feeds to stay abreast of the latest Black Friday news and offers.

My Black Friday Deals takes a sprinkling of social media and mixes it together with a dash of blogging to create a place for shoppers to interact. The site uses the mobile photo slide show app Whrrl to allow bloggers to take pictures of the best deals they can find in stores and upload them to the site to be voted on by deal seekers. The best deals will then be shared on Twitter, Flickr , and Facebook.

Full disclosure: Susan works with Collective Bias, which runs My Black Friday Deals.

Read the entire post on Mashable.com.