Chris Brogan has written a social media starter pack post on his blog.
His categories are: Listening, Speaking, Community and Rich Media. This is a terrific way to breakdown the tools that are available when using and participating in social media.
Listening: In social media, as in life, listening is twice as important as speaking. Online, the tool for listening is a news reader. This type of software allows you to understand the conversation going on out there, and the best of them permits you to do a little more understanding of what you’re “hearing.”
Speaking: As Chris notes, there are a ton of ways to speak in social media. His suggestions are for improvement. I haven’t created an RSS feed for this blog with Feedburner, but I will! Great tip. Bottom line, be findable. If people are interested in speaking back – make sure they have lots of ways to do so.
Community: About social networking, this part of social media is tremendously important. Beyond MySpace and Facebook, Twitter, Ning and even Flickr or Digg are helping to build communities.
The last part, Rich Media, is the section I haven’t delved into as much as the others. Chris talks about some great tools for audio and video. Check out the post for more info.
My students will be creating a podcast Winter term in Advanced Writing, so I’m sure I’ll be coming back to this post for advice.
