In the old days, the choices were limited on how to get your content out.  Now they are nearly infinite.  Let’s outline a plan that will narrow those choices down in a rational way:

1. Prepare your content.  First thing’s first – you’ll need to figure out what you want to deliver.  How to do that well could be the topic of a lot of discussion, but let’s assume you have a primary content vehicle.  For the sake of this example, we’ll call it a blog, but it could very well be a company website or even content on another website (maybe you’re trying to promote your YouTube account page, for example).
2. Pick your social media tools.  Picking the right tools requires knowing something about your audience, a little research, and a little time.Resources such as AddThis’s services page (which was mentioned above) can help you learn what’s out there, how much various tools are being used, and how the social media landscape is change.  We’ll use some of the more popular services here as examples (the specific services are discussed below), which will be good starting points, but you’ll need to continue researching this constantly changing area.
3. Prepare your social media tools.  Many tools require some usage both to get familiar with them and to create an account with enough activity to make you a credible or effective user (for example, social networking sites require connections with other users, social bookmarking sites should have a few bookmarks setup in your account, and so on).
4. Launch your campaign.  Once everything is in place, it’s time to use the services you have chosen and gotten ready in order to focus on one thing: getting links to your content in front of as many different, relevant people as possible.

Example Social Media Campaign

Let’s give this a try with a hypothetical example.  We’ll assume that you are launching a new blog for your organization, and that you’ve done your homework preparing good content and getting the thing in order for the world to see.

Now you’re ready to prep and launch your social media campaign.  We want to implement the strategy above such that it does the following:

• Employs other blogs, microblogging, RSS feeds, social networking and social bookmarking to deliver your content.
• Can be turned into an efficient process.
• Can be performed by members of your marketing staff who do not necessarily know everything about the business.
• Is effective!

Step 1: Prepare

For this example, we’ll pick popular services that fall into each of the categories above and take a quick look at each:

• Other Blogs. Part of your campaign will include posting replies on blogs that are relevant to your content which 1) are useful contributions to the discussion, and 2) occasionally link back to your content as a resource. It is crucial that you do this well, such that you are never seen as posting simply to create links, so you’ll need to stay involved in the conversation even when you do not have content to link to. We have found that the best way to do this is to get an RSS reader (if you don’t know what this means, check out the tour on http://reader.google.com/) and sign up for blogs that are related to your industry.  This is also an excellent way to keep up with your field, so it’s a double value.
• Microblogging.  Although there are other tools out there, Twitter and Facebook (Facebook does much more than just microblogging, and is also very popular social networking tool that I’ll discuss below) seem to be on top of the field now.  Create accounts for each (you’ll need to create a fan page in Facebook, not a regular user) and get familiar with how they work.  In Twitter, it is important to use the tool as you wish it to be used for your content … seek out relevant business profiles and “follow” them.  Chances are, many of them will follow you, and these will be the people who get your “tweets.”  Tweet about interesting business-related things, such as links to upcoming events your organization is holding or links to interesting, relevant articles.
• RSS Feeds.  Make sure your blog’s RSS feeds (all popular blogging software has RSS feeds built in) are signed up with popular services such as Feedburner that will help you get the feed out to as many people as possible.  If you need to brush up on RSS, just search Google for “rss tutorial”.
• Social Networking. I mentioned creating a Fan page for your organization above on Facebook, which is a good idea.  The other social networking tool you’ll use is LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com), which is a great tool for anybody in a position that’s even remotely sales-related.  LinkedIn has become the social network tool for businesses, and you’ll be surprised to find out how many of your contacts are using it.  Create an account, find out how to automatically show your blog’s posts in your account, and start building your network of connections.
• Social Bookmarking.  You’ll pick a couple of the more popular social bookmarking sites, Digg and Stumbeupon, get signed up, and get familiar with them.  In fact, you’ll get the whole staff to create accounts and get familiar with them, because you’ll need their help when it’s time to launch our campaign (be careful, social bookmarking services are somewhat addictive … you are guaranteed to find some interesting, silly or obscene links to send to your friends after just a few minutes).

There are a lot of references to various social media tools above, and not enough space to even scratch the surface of each one here, so you may need to do a bit of research until you’re comfortable with them.  Once you’re ready, let’s move on to …

Step 2: Launch

Now that everything is in place, let’s launch this campaign.  Since our primary content vehicle for this example is a blog, we’ll assume that you’ve just published a new blog post, and will use each of the tools above to promote it:

• Other Blogs. You’ve done a good job keeping up with relevant blogs in your industry, and you’ve been participating in an intelligent way that contributes to the discussion.  Now you’ll continue making contributions by finding issues being discussed on those blogs that your content answers, and replying with a link back to your content.  Remember, you MUST keep these posts useful and relevant.  Anything less and you will quickly move from contributor to spammer.
• Microblogging.  You’ve been adding followers and tweeting about interesting things.  Now you’ll send a tweet about your latest article on Twitter, and make a status update on Facebook with a link to your latest work.
• RSS Feeds.  Your new article should be automatically available on your RSS feed, which you have carefully registered with services like Feedburner such that they get out to the largest audience possible.
• Social Networking. You’ve got your network of connections built up now, and you’ve got your blog hooked up to your LinkedIn and Facebook accounts such that new articles are instantly visible to your whole network.  So, if all goes well, your new blog post will show up here automatically.
• Social Bookmarking.  You and your co-workers have been using one or two good social bookmarking tools, creating bookmarks and looking at others.  Now it’s time to create a publicly available bookmark to your latest article, or to give it a thumbs up in Stumbleupon.  Get everyone to do this, and hopefully others will find your content just as you’ve found theirs.  Remember, in tools that allow others to rate your bookmarks and show them based on popularity (which most have some mechanism to do), a bookmark to a bad article will be seen by very few people, so you need to have confidence in your content.

For more information about social media, check out our latest presentation Social Media Revealed on SlideShare. Also, if you have a group or company that might benefit from a presentation like this, contact Heather Jewell at 724-430-0490 Ext. 204 to find out about our workshop series.