Chances you are already using social media as part of your marketing strategy or you wish you were.  There's no shortage of social media platforms to choose from ... Twitter is hot today.  FaceBook is the rage with the "masters" (over 35) crowd.  Then there's MySpace, YouTube, Digg, LinkedIn, etc, etc ... Hard to keep track of them all.  So where do you start? 

Be prepared for some hard work.  There are plenty of gurus out there happily providing us with loads of free information, but the hash reality is that takes a lot of time and effort just to keep your site up to date.  

Find out what your customers use and focus your efforts there.  One of our clients is focused on teenagers that play sports.  My teenage daughter uses FaceBook every day.  She could care less about LinkedIn, Twitter, or FeedBurner. 

Don't get sucked into the black hole of social networking.  Just like any marketing program, you are in this to get results.  Stay focused on your goals and continually assess how your efforts are helping you achieve your goals.  Tools like Google Analytics can provide hard data you need.

Don't be afraid to get professional help.  We all have our areas of expertise.  Focus on what your good at and get the help you need to succeed.    

At 53 Technology our primary focus is application development, we're not social media gurus.  But a big part of what we do is helping our customers succeed on the web, so we pay attention to trends and new services so we can understand how these impact our customers' businesses and where future opportunities might lie.  Social media is cool and if done right can be a real asset to your business.  SportsPage needs to be on FaceBook because theire users are there.  For a recent project we integrated access to users' LinkedIn accounts because those users are professionals already using LinkedIn.  Built-in integration added to the applications cool factor and helped boost the customers credibility to their user base.  

Update - Here's a worthwhile article on the subject found on Twitter -- 4 Keys to Success with Social Media

Update - Twitter: Building Businesses Tweet by Tweet