Essentially it's about building a reputation as an informative, helpful member of a community, sharing relevant, interesting information, not only about your business but about anything that's relevant in your field.

We work with you to shape your social media strategy, taking the load off your back but taking care to preserve and improve the tone and reputation of your business. It might be a wee bit cheesy, but we like to think of ourselves as your Virtual Ambassadors.

We believe in encouraging long-term commitment, building up trust, and forging a dialogue with customers. Rather than getting as many sign-ups, fans or followers as possible, we strongly believe in quality over quantity, especially in the early stages. Social media acts like compound interest, growing bigger over time and allowing you to get more and more out of it.

Linked In

LinkedIn is a bit like Facebook, but with a suit on. The focus is on developing a network of contacts, to facilitate finding work or employees, or finding service-providers and partners for your projects.

As such it might be less useful than Facebook and Twitter for communicating directly with the public, but its focus on professional networking can help you open up channels you had not previously been aware of. It also helps simply in raising your profile.

It is perhaps less open than other social networks, but the payoff is that the connections you make are high-quality and trustworthy. With LinkedIn you can access your contacts' networks, provide information to create a presence for your business, promote news and events, and receive information about events relating to your field.

Blogging

A blog, short for "web log," is a web site that has frequent updates, and is used like an online diary or journal that anyone in the world can read and subscribe to. Blog authors write and publish blog posts about whatever they're interested in, and posts can include videos, commentary on other blog posts, scientific speculation or photo-essays on the history of the toothbrush.

As such it is a very democratic arena for writing, and bloggers who have interesting things to say - even (or especially) if it's a niche interest - will find their writings becoming popular, no matter what their official qualifications. Anyone who can write can do it and gain a following: you don't need a degree in journalism or a job in a newspaper to have your voice heard.

You might get the impression from this that ever since the advent of blogging the web must have become full of pointless ramblings and the obnoxious opinions of raving maniacs - and you'd be right. However, the good stuff tends to rise to the top, and blogging is now taken very seriously: today there are few big businesses who don't use blogging in some form, and serious writers and journalists are using it more and more.

The most useful thing about the blog as a platform is syndication, which is what makes blog posts available to other sites and software. What this boils down to is that anyone can subscribe to a blog's syndicated feed (sometimes called a "web feed," "RSS feed" or just "feed"), and read the blog in a computer program of their choosing. The feed contains the latest content of the blog, held in a standardized format that can be understood by numerous kinds of software.

Wherever you see this icon anywhere on the web you can click on it to subscribe. At that point you will have to get the feed into some kind of feed-reader. After that, your feed reader will display up-to-date blog posts from all the blogs you subscribe to, without your having to remember to visit the site.

From the content management and business point of view, blogs are an unparalleled way of keeping your web site content fresh and interesting, and through the use of web feeds you can continually communicate with your subscribers and very often drive traffic back to your site.

It's not the only way to do things, but a blog can act as a hub for your social media strategy. You can send out links that go direct to your blog posts as soon as you publish them (and you can do this automatically if you wish), and between times a bit of micro-blogging on Twitter can keep people interested.

Most blogs allow readers to leave a comment on an individual blog post, and this is great for getting people involved, and getting to know your subscribers. But a good blogger also reads and comments on other blogs. Not only is this likely to help you make friends and influence people, but it will also drive more traffic to your web site.

Social Media Are, or Social Media Is?

The best answer to that might be "who cares?" After all, language is for communication, and if breaking a few "rules" doesn't hinder that, then it doesn't matter.

But few things get people in this country as riled up as grammar and spelling. Technically speaking, media is the plural of medium, so it makes sense to say "the media are..."

However, contrary to what those people say, there are no rules for English, only conventions, and those conventions change over time. In this case, nobody would deny that saying "the media is..." feels very natural. This is a sign that it is in fact a better way of using the word, i.e. as a collective noun.

So, we're going to stick our necks out here and use "social media is..." Please direct your letters of complaint to the address below.