A Social Media Blueprint for Your Business

The latest rage on the internet is moving into Web 2.0 media tools. You undoubtedly have heard some of the names such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and countless others. The combination of these new tools is defined as social media where people connected to the internet go to socialize and share stories or resources. Should you or your company plunge into the social media landscape?

Your first decision is to determine if social media will work for you. Then you can decide how to get involved with social media. Let's start by deciding if it is worth your time to move into the online social scene.

Many companies have adopted social media as a marketing platform. If you think about how you can get your message included in a YouTube video, you can align your marketing message with entertainment. This is a classic win as your brand follows the viral network of the video to thousands of online viewers.

Before you jump in, determine who the audience typically includes at various social media websites. Is this where you will find buyers of your product or service? For example, LinkedIn is an online business profile so the users can be very different from users on Twitter that functions as a social bookmarking website. If your buyer does not read and comment on blogs, then don't waste your resources creating a company blog.

It is important to evaluate what your competitors are doing in social media. If your competition has been aggressively moving into the social network, you should evaluate how successful they are with these new tools. You can visit their blogs, review the comments and even subscribe to their services. This will present an opportunity to collect competitor intelligence to help with your social media decisions. To collect this information, you can search on Google Blog Search and Technorati for your competitors and products or phases.

Lastly, it is important to identify what activities your customers engage in. Where do they go online to find information? Do your customers participate in online product review sites? You may want to determine exactly what your customers are saying about your product or service. Again, you can perform a product or company search to collect this information. Additionally, you may want to survey your existing customer to ask what they are doing in social media.

After working through whom, what and when, you will need to have knowledge about some of the tools used in social media if you decide to take the plunge. The following presents a list of social media tools that can be combined to create your social blueprint.

* Google Reader constantly checks your favorite news sites and blogs for new information. You can set this up using keywords, geography and other variables to know what is being posted on the internet. This is considered a listening tool.

* Technorati and Google Blogsearch are search tools that you can use to search the blog universe to find keywords and phrases that have been posted.

* Wordpress is a free blog tool that you can use to start a blog that is as easy and user friendly that you will find. This is a great way to dip your tool into the water to see if blogging is right for your company.

* LinkedIn is a business profiling site where business people go to follow friends, peers and jobs on the web. The interesting thing about LinkIn is that you can see who is connected to whom in the six degrees of separation format.

* YouTube is the most popular video viewing website on the internet. You should visit this site to see what people are watching as well as how companies are interacting with the video community.

* Facebook and Myspace are the popular social profile websites. Users can join networks based on multiple variables such as school, geography, topic and many other items. People can add friends and send them messages to stay connected.

* Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts.

* Flickr is one of the earliest Web 2.0 applications that functions as an online community that hosts images and video. Here you can share personal photos and videos within your network.

* Squidoo is a free website designed to make it easy for anyone to set up a single page on a topic he or she knows or cares a lot about. Advertising revenue is shared with these content creators, and some of it is given to charity.

The listed social media tools only scratch the surface of what is available on the internet. These tools will present the foundation of understanding and utilizing social tools to grow your business. From this, you can create your blueprint of how social media is contributing to your business success.