Pings and pokes and Tweets…what IS Social Media? The online technologies and practices which people use to share opinions, insights, and experiences with each other.

Identify Your Craving: What do you want to do – to position yourself professionally or just connect with friends?

Consult: Your organization, your boss as to whether or not they have limitations as to what you can say about your professional life.

Evaluate Your Choices: Keeping everything up to date DOES require time.

Choose Your Ingredients: Twitter and other microblogging sites are equivalent to the staus updates on Facebook. All the sites have different purposes: sharing, publishing, social games, rating sites. What are widgets? Icons which can be placed on a site as a link.

Not just for kids! The fastest growing demographic for facebook is 35-55!

Livestreams: One platform to organize all of your individual social media accounts and post once to update all (more on this later later)

Neilson: 200,000,000 users on Facebook as of last week. That’s double the population from December until April! Social networking now the fourth most popular activity on the internet, even surpassing email!

Treat virtual communication as you would “real world” communication….you wouldn’t wait a week to return an associate’s voice mail, so don’t wait a week to respond to someone’s wall posting, tweet or poke!

Q & A
What about people who fill up your Facebook wall?
You can use customized settings at Facebook to control this. Pivacy controls are your best friends – learn how to use them to your advantage!