If you’re in New York on November 5th, or just want a great workshop, we’re doing a training on Social Media – Planning Strategy, Monitoring & Measuring Your Way to Success as a part of Search Engine Strategies’ SEM Training New York: Full or Half Day Workshops.

We’ll take you beyond the fundamentals of understanding just what social media is. If you’ve got the grasp of what Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Linked In all are, then you are ready for the next step. That next step is all about Strategy, Monitoring and Measuring.

For those that aren’t aware, Twitter is a social network that allows ‘friends’ to communicate with each other in brief 140 character bursts of text (known as tweets). You can send these tweets directly through the twitter website, or through one of many twitter applications (such as the desktop based twhirl, or the Blackberry based Twitterberry).

It doesn’t sound too tempting does it? Personally I put off joining it for quite a while, not wanting to have to decipher the “WOT RU Doing?” and “I Dunt no u?”s of the world.

But then I actually tried it, and I found that it was actually a good communication tool. People talk in full English, and hold conversations that are interesting and, because of the tool, interactive. Obviously there are some people out there that try to take advantage of the tool to try and spam or over push their services / sites / products, but you’ll get that with most media, so it’s not unexpected.

But how can twitter help your business?

• It can group people interested in your company, products, or cause together, helping them communicate, and enabling them to work together to spread the message about you.
• It can help you to broadcast news and events about your company to subscribers, showing that there’s a ‘beyond P.O.S.’ side to your firm.
• It can help you to know what’s going on with your users, giving them the ability to give you feedback as to what they like / don’t like, and what they feel your company can do better. Although if you’d prefer to lurk rather than engage, twitter has a search function (formerly known as Summize)that you can use to search all twitter conversations for a mention of your company / product / etc.

So should Twitter be a part of your social media strategy? Well, as is the usual theme with these social media sites, you need to have time set aside to build up and maintain an account, so just signing up, and adding a bunch of friends, then not doing much won’t work. You have to tweet, and interact with other people, answering their tweets. Eventually you’ll build up an account that can serve you and your organization well.

Oh, and if you’re interested in following the tweets of the Serengeti Team, you can do so at https://twitter.com/endlessplain.

The next presenter was Jeremy Pepper from Boingo with a talk about how Strategy fits into your social media decisions.

Why should you use social media? Don’t just do it. You need to have the strategy in place to determine what you’re going to do with it.

You need to engage with people who are enthusiastic about your company / product / topic. First you need to engage your internal audience in order to get buy-in at all levels.

Q. Coming from an internal perspective how do I wrestle control of content from marketing?
A. Internal education is vitally important to get the conversation on your side. Find out what people are talking about with regard to your company, and get marketing to understand that there needs to be a conversation from your side too. Don’t ignore sites with active communities such as Yelp!

Q. How does social media fit into our marketing and communications platform
A. Creating groups allows our customers to interact, and therefore help each other to connect. There are so many tools out there right now, you need to pick the right tools for your company, it may be that blogs aren’t the right tool for you to use. Investigate and formulate your strategy.

Q. How do you pitch to a blogger?
A. First identify the bloggers, and the influencers. Don’t assume that because someone has 5,000 ‘friends’ on a social network that they are influencers. If they don’t respond, don’t spam.

Q. Using these tools you’re becoming a content creator rather than pushing out stories to other media, your thoughts?
A. The web has always been about communication, we’ve always been content producers and publishers, the difference is just in the distribution of the content. We’re trying now to push out stories with less spin and less buzzwords, but the difference is that we now interact with the customers.