Henriette Laidlaw's Profile

Gaining visibility online via social media tools, or social media optimization, can build a presence. It also needs to be managed.

Jansons recommended having an account in at least one of every major category of service and to choose the most popular, such as Twitter () for microblogging, YouTube () for video sharing, Delicious () for links, Last.fm () for music, Flickr () for images, Digg () for news and Facebook () for a profile.

Funnel all those services through a lifestreaming tool such as FriendFeed () and moderate the content sharing there for efficiency. Jansons said to link those accounts to your blog and personal site and put the blog RSS feeds on the lifestreaming site and Facebook.

But don’t set it and forget it. Use the social media tools regularly.

Barone said she used Twitter to build her personal brand in a way that helped lift and strengthen her company. She stressed that whether you’re using social media for yourself or for your company, know your goals and reasons for getting involved in order to measure success.