Great overview from Maisha Walker at Inc. http://blog.inc.com/e-commerce/2009/06/a_guide_to_social_media_tools.html

I caught a tweet over at Robert Scoble’s Twitter site the other day that referenced a CEO who was asking how to drive business via social media.  I had been thinking about this as well – in particular about how a small business or non-profit gets started with such an effort.  Here are my thoughts at a high level. ..

Fundamentally, social media provides new ways to connect, communicate, and collaborate with others.  They enhance our ability to build and nurture relationships and to share ideas in more robust and innovative ways.   That said, they help you foster conversations – they don’t guarantee you get any business . 

There are more than enough books on the subject, but here is short list of ideas to get started…

1. Enable a Conversation.  Start a blog about your business and use it as a way to enable a conversation with your customers, partners, and/or professionals within your community of practice.  Through the blog, consider audio casts or podcasts to enhance the visitor’s experience and to tell your story in more interesting ways…
2. Develop An Audience-Centric Voice. Offer value-add information to your audience to build rapport, credibility, and trust. Become the conduit between the world of your business or industry and the people who can benefit from it.  This can be as the business or as one or several individuals.
3. Build a Personal Brand. Building on an audience-centric strategy, be your own champion. Share with your audience the passion you have for your business and industry and your passion to help your audience be successful. Find and nurture other champions for your business and bring them into your network and/or conversations.
4. Participate. Find communities of practice and engage with other professionals. Collaborate and share best practices. You learn, they learn. Bring your knowledge back to your own audience.  Leverage bookmarking tools and aggregators to stay abreast of industry information. Synthesize. Share. Comment.
5. Go Where People Already Are.  This was offered as T-Mobile’s wi-fi strategy when they rolled out services across the world’s Starbucks locations.  Social network sites are great for creating micro-communities of friends and/or business associates. Many of these sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc), allow users to create groups, pull in feeds from content aggregators, and – generally – share a significant amount of information with other users. 
6. Think Systemically. Cross-link with others’ blogs, business sites, and online resources (i.e. partners, customers, other experts, and industry associations).  The more links you have, the more likely you will be found by others.  Links also connect you into other networks providing opportunity to grow your community or reach new ones. 
7. Measure Progress.  Links, site visits, downloads, and RSS feeds can all be measured (and any other interaction over the web).   Track them over time to see how you’re doing.

Through a combination of some of these, or similar, efforts you can build greater visibility for your business through community building and engaging conversations. My personal recommendation is to start simple, hone your online voice and persona, and learn your way around, then scale. 

In my next post, I’ll outline a couple of scenarios using popular sites, services, and tools to illustrate these concepts in a practical way.