Welcome to our workshop, a step-by-step guide to getting engaged in using online business tools, otherwise known as social media. This workshop was developed by Standing Partnership for use by its clients, colleagues and friends. It is created as a wiki, a collection of web pages designed for collaborative contribution, editing and feedback. We welcome your thoughts and ideas for improvement.

Each section of the workshop introduces a social media tool, followed by an exercise to help you learn and begin to use it. You may be wondering why we refer to tools such as blogs as "business tools" -- the reason is simple: communication. If you're in business and want to communicate with your customers, potential customers, business partners, contacts, employees and colleagues, social media is the fastest, most efficient, most cost-effective way to reach exactly the audiences that are interested in what you have to say, sell or offer.

Most of our clients have engaged in one or more of the tools introduced in this workshop. What gets tricky is the integration of all of the tools and, as business people, designing the parameters for employee use, finding the time needed to manage and update the tools and learning how to manage all of this "new" technology as part of your marketing and business growth initiatives. Standing Partnership can help guide your organization through these decisions and develop a plan to reach your reputation management objectives in the online space.

A word about integration: all of these tools can be interconnected. With a blog, you can connect to other blogs and your blog content can feed to other sites like Facebook. Twitter can also be used to update your Facebook profile and direct people to your blog. Your LinkedIn profile can also connect viewers to your blog. Connecting all of these tools and using them in the most effective, strategic ways possible extends your reach and helps build the community that supports your business.

Isn't it time you learned how to use these tools?



Table of Contents

• "I Don't Know What This Whole RSS Thing Is Anyway"
• I'm Social; I Network -- Why Do I Need Social Networking?
• Show and Tell
• Be a Blogger

For each section of this interactive workshop, leave any questions or comments in the Threads section that appears below on every page. We'll be monitoring the comments and will respond. Also, please leave a comment letting us know when you've completed each exercise.

Thank you from the social media team at Standing Partnership!

Continue to the first chapter: What Turns You On?