I know that as soon as this goes live, I will be pointed to 10 posts that are either identical or very similar. I’m OK with that but I’m hoping there’s a little originality in this. I introduce you to The social media circle of virtue – 5 things you need to do to get your social groove rocking.

These 5 steps appear to be common to most successful online social types. This isn’t necessarily a linear process (although it probably could be) but if you’re new to the space and want to get busy then this framework could prove a useful disciplinarian.

1. Publish
Objective: Publish stuff worth people’s attention and time.
Activity level: Maintain a good level of frequency. On Twitter, commit to at least 5 tweets per day. If you’re blogging or using Flickr, try to post 3-5 things at least per week. If you’re on YouTube, you could probably get away with one per week.

2. Promote
Objective: Get as many people to look at what you’ve created as possible and encourage them to share it.
Activities: Tweet it, add it to your Facebook status (a few times throughout the day and delete the old statuses), share the link on Facebook, change your LinkedIn status, email people personally and in small groups, talk about it, social-bookmark it (the dynamics of social bookmarking is a whole other story). On Flickr, add your photos to groups, make sure you set them up with keywords in the tags, headlines and description.

There are hundreds of other techniques – suitability will depend to a degree on your subject matter. But use your immediate social networks – that’s where you should have most goodwill.

3. Comment
Objective: Be social and drive traffic to your content.
Activities: Post comments on like-minded blogs, on Flickr photos – because you’re interested and want to engage with that person, not simply because you’re seeking traffic. Reciprocity starts with a bit of give.

4. Contribute
Objective: Generate goodwill and reputation.
Activities: Whatever you think you’re good at, find a host and give it away – a website, a blog, a forum, an event. Anything, anywhere.

5. Network
Objective: Build and cement real relationships.
Activities: Communicate within then outside of the channels you may deal like-minded people in. Meet them offline. Work out if you can collaborate, co-contribute.

Extremely basic thoughts but I’ve come across a lot of people who are only doing 1-2 of these things. If you’re on of them, give the others a go this week and let us know how you went.

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