We hear a lot about leveraging social media these days.  Facebook, LinkedIn and twitter seem to be the front runners as new marketing and presence avenues, joining the legacy systems such as email and websites.

When examine information access and flow there are three primary categories regarding data flow.

1) Passive Push.  A company website is a great example.  Information is written and published for the consumer to find and read.  This is great for reference material about your company and it's products.

2) Active Push.  Sending information directly to the consumer via email or a newsletter service.  RSS feeds also fall in this category.  The goal, however, should be to entice the consumer to view your content where you want them to.  More on this a bit later.

3) Active Conversational.  Twitter, Facebook and any other environment where genuine open conversation occurs support this model.  Using posts identifying articles published on your website is a great approach.  However, to get the most out of social medial, the channels need to be active and worked by employees in your company.

The fundamental spirit of social media is conversational.  It's not a soapbox.  More needs to happen on top of echoing an RSS feed there.  Sure, people will consume information in that media, but the real benefit is direct to many communication.

How do we leverage all three of these avenues, especially if you're a small business with limited resources?

It's simpler than you think.

1) Define your information publication strategy. More often than not, your primary focus should be getting people to visit your website.  So get them there.  Write articles to establish your expertise in your chosen field and publish them on your site.

2) Register your site with google. Get a google webmaster account and tell them everything you can about your site including site maps and such.

3) Establish an excellent set of RSS feeds separated by topic. Having multiple RSS feeds will be very beneficial to both your efforts as well as your information consumers.  Allowing your information consumers to find items directly specific to their interests, is only one benefit.  With a newsletter generation engine, Segregated RSS feeds will also allow you to clearly and easily manage content in separate sections.

4) Establish presences on the primary social media environments. Start with twitter and Facebook with linkedin being a close third.  Do not just set these up and walk away.  Begin following people with like interests.  Spot and befriend leaders in your market segments.  These will be the people organizing and leading specific chats and stuff.  They'll prove invaluable in the long term.

5) Use hootsuite or similar tool to push notifications about your website posts to the social media networks.  This will help leverage the friendships and network you build with your SM participation and drive more targeted traffic to your site.  In many cases this can be automated.  There are solutions for every situation and budget, so take a look and see which solutions fit your situation.

6) Advertise those SM presences on your website.  This will allow people to choose how to receive your content.... Via email, newsletters or social media.

That's it.  In a couple of weeks you should have the beginnings of an excellent social media presence and community of your clients and prospective customers.