GETTING STARTED:

Before you or your employees unleash your efforts and dive headfirst into the “social sphere” you need to set some boundaries and define a few things:

WHO YOU ARE:

• Know the image you are projecting (literally and metaphorically).
• Come up with a slogan or catch phrase and stick to it.
• If you don’t own a URL yet, make sure you get one before you start your campaign so you can have everyone spreading the exact same links

Realize that you are climbing the “branding hill”.  Consistency is key!

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE:

OK, here is where you’ll need to understand the difference between all the ‘socials’ involved in Social Networking.  Here’s a brief glimpse at each:

• Social Networks: like MySpace or Facebook. Meet friends and show the world who you are.
• Social Bookmarking: like Magnolia or Del.icio.us (or related recommendation system Stumble Upon),share your bookmarks with your friends and find what they like.
• Social News: like Digg or Reddit. Submit any type of content to be voted upon by other users.
• Social Media: like YouTube or Flickr. Share your videos or pictures and comment on others.
• Blogs: like Mashable (on social networking) or Technorati (on technology). Keep people informed by writing a post or article. Include visuals. Best online source for writing blogs is Skellie.
• Micro Blogging: like Twitter or Tumblr. Let people know what you’re doing, what you’re interested in, or whatever – sort of like an “away message” on instant messenger.

How do you know which ones to target?  It all depends on you and your business.  If your product is music, like mine, then you probably won’t be spending much time on a business social network like LinkedIn Instead you might use one like ShareNow.com – the creators of Lifestyle Social Networking (my current employer) where you can participate in different communities based on common interests.

INTERACTION:

You are you – so maintain your you-ness!  People don’t want a generic response, pretty sure they never did.  They are done with corporate emails and packaged statements.

While it may be time consuming to actually communicate with people, Aaron Uhrmacher at Mashable tells us that “Social media platforms help facilitate conversations between individuals, not companies” – you are absolutely relished by your consumers.

Your goal is to establish a relationship here.  You represent a company or product, but because you are still you people will take the time to listen.  You need their trust or you will be written off to the spam pile.  Once you’re in that pile it’s over.

The type of relationship you are looking to forge will give you an idea of what medium you will use to communicate (which will, in turn, shed light on the appropriate people within your business who should do the communicating.)  Should you be putting up funny video responses to spread virally?  Creating a fascinating blog?  Running contests and promoting them with micro-blogging?  Maybe you build a widget that can be embedded across the net… or eventually all of the above!

Don’t forget – be open and honest about who you are and what you do!  Otherwise you will be found out.  It’s inevitable!

PURPOSE:

Keep the bigger picture in mind!  Your only investment here is time, but the fact remains that time is limited.  Find the balance between infiltrating the entire internet to splash your link everywhere and only getting to know a select crowd on one or two communities.  Maybe you split your task into a job for two or three people.

Using Social Networking to promote your business puts you directly in touch with your consumers.  Have fun with it!