Let me say this loud and clear – I am not an expert on social media. Neither are most of the people who are charging high consulting fees and proclaiming themselves to be so – just read Rob Bowen’s excellent article on the subject and you’ll understand what I mean by that.

Social media is new. It’s developing. Companies are growing and failing daily in this arena. Nonetheless, there are some things I’ve observed having been active in social media for a year and a half now (longer than a few other “experts”). I know that freelancers, companies, and organizations are lining up for information on how to get involved – I talk with them quite often.

If your knowledge doesn’t really extend beyond email, here are some of what I would consider to be your “next steps…”

1. Don’t put all your eggs in the basket of social media. I start off with this one on purpose. People online like to talk about the “social media revolution” and that this is the “wave of the future.” True. Social media may kill newspapers after all, but the reality is, you probably still have a large customer base not on Twitter. Keep marketing in the ways that work – you can be a student of the future at the same time.

2. Visit the following four sites and complete the following five steps on each (where applicable)…

1. Twitter
2. LinkedIn
3. Facebook
4. Friendfeed

and the five steps…

1. Join. Pick the same username at every place, and make it match your brand if possible.
2. Set up your profile and don’t be arrogant. Be personal and touchable.
3. Link them together and link them back to your main site as much as possible.
4. Join groups (particularly LinkedIn and Facebook) that pertain to your niche and add some friends with similar interestes.
5. Observe for a minimum of one week. Don’t sell. Don’t link to anything. Watch. Listen. Learn.

3. Subscribe to feeds. It’s easier than it looks. Sign up for Google Reader. Then when you’re on a site that offers valuable information about your niche, look for the universal sign of an rss feed’s presence, the feed icon (see the image on the right). Click it and “subscribe” in Google Reader. Now every time you open Google Reader, that site’s new content will be waiting on you. It’s like email, but so much better. You don’t have to read it all and if you get in too deep, “mark all as read” and restore the sanity to your life.

4. Start giving. That doesn’t mean you have to give stuff away, it just means that you need to establish yourself as a giver, in general. Pass along helpful and meaningful information. Add value to the lives and livelihoods of others. Support people. Help people. Encourage people.

5. Build a community (aka, a tribe). After you’ve observed quietly, and after you’ve contributed something to others, then and only then do you have my permission (though I’m really not an expert…) to ask for anything. When you start asking for support, be reciprocal.

6. Explore the vast and wide-open space that is social media. In time, you’ll understand why I “share” Google reader items, “stumble upon” great links, bookmark resources in “delicious,” and pass along inspirational things via “Posterous.” But all of that will come in time.

7. Have fun. He who dies with the most friends on Facebook should have had more of an offline life… and yes, he still dies.

By the way, I could be dead wrong about all of this, but it’s what I did about two years ago. I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference… or something like that.

photo credit: wirralwater

Disclaimer: Absolutely NONE of this foolish rubbish actually happened…

photo credit: Torley

So surely you heard about the social media meltdown today, right? If not, perhaps it was because your only source of news about the world around you (Twitter) was unavailable in a cruel, twisted catch-22! So what happened during the 2 hours that Twitter and Facebook were down? Here’s the scoop as I heard it straight from the whale’s mouth, who heard it from a friend of a follower of a fan…

First, there was looting and pillaging in the interwebs. The front windows of several ecommerce stores were broken out and virtual goods ransacked! Cheth Studios, owned by @cheth, had several precious icons stolen. It was absolute mayhem… or at least there was a strange silence heard ’round the world as @mayhemstudios was unable to tweet a single resource.

The stock market suffered violent, cliff-hanging, nail-biting dips and crashes due to the billions of dollars not made by @guykawasaki‘s ad-laden (but truly interesting) tweets. The madness settled in on @scobleizer thought it was his fault for paying a developer for a script to unfollow 106,000 people in a single day. He took on a strange green appearance and seemed as if to be transforming into the Hulk himself!

One family bought out the local IGA’s entire stock of canned pinto beans and panty hose, then sacrificed all of their pets in an effort to stockpile for the #twitpocalypse, round 2. @DrRus, @bobhallam, @ScottSCarver were interrogated by international criminal investigators for an alleged plot to “take over the world via Twitter.” No word on who the “rat” was that turned them in.

Hospitals filled to capacity and triage (sp?) centers were established in barricaded intersections to deal with the flood of marketers, MLM, and social media experts who were suffering from severe withdrawals of a salty, ham-like substance also known as, uh, spam. Meanwhile, FriendFeed was abuzz with conversations about its inherent superiority. That was precisely where @imjustcreative was overheard to simply observe about this whole debacle, “#kaboom.”

Oh, @aplusk surged further ahead of @cnnbrk… but still no one really cares.

News flash: news spreads faster through a crowd than to a crowd. If you want to break news, whisper it into an ear and see what happens. If there is a positive word that describes our age, it’s community. Seth Godin knows this. Chris Brogan understands it. Motrin learned it the hard way. People talk.

The bad news is, people aren’t always accurate. Remember that game where we whispered something in an ear then let it travel around the circle? The story at the end was always rather embellished. We have, however, figured this out enough that we’ve become one of the most discerning and skpetical societies in history.

What are the advantages of engaging people through social media?

• Connecting with disconnected people.
• Immediate and bold feedback.
• Marketing of the viral variety.
• Popularity, re-distributed.
• Profit for the good of all, not for the sake of self.

I know these are abstract ideas, so here’s a more practical way to approach social media…

• Get a Facebook account.
• Tweet on Twitter, and learn the rules.
• Read, comment, and discuss.
• Offer, give, share.
• Don’t stress out – you can’t rule every network.

Will you succeed in this new arena? It’s really not up to you, it’s up to the crowd. But the crowd just might listen if what you whisper is worthy.