Roger Harris, Principal at Harris Social Media, provides a nuts and blots start for businesses to start engaging in social media.

1. A Small Step, A Giant Leap Launching your business into social media space

2. Any launch can be scary, and potentially risky. We can make things less scary by understanding. So let’s first cover the basics…

3. What is social media?

7. There are countless social media platforms and websites

8. How do we map the social media space?

9. So how can social media impact your business?

11. Take Facebook as an example #1: I see an invitation to a “cause”

12. #2: I see my friend Sheril has invited me to join a cause, “Science Debate.” I click “Join Cause.”

13. #3: I decide to join the cause and get a welcome screen. The screen then invites me to send my own invitation.

14. #4: A checklist appears, allowing me to choose which friends to invite.

15. #5. I click on the friends I think will be interested in the cause and hit send.

16. #6. I can set my status to show that I joined the cause. It appears on my timeline so even friends I didn’t invite can see I joined the cause.

24. Are you here? So where is your business in social media space? This is a map of interconnections between Web sites in social networks. You need to be here.

25. When you’re trying something new, it can feel a bit lonely.

26. You want to take the right steps, to go carefully.

27. But also go boldly where no one has gone before. We can best do this by learning and understanding .

29. Use iGoogle and RSS feeds to monitor news and updates on need-to-know news channels.

30. But getting back down to earth, social media can be overwhelming. There is so much going on. The main issue is the sheer quantity of information. How do we deal with it all?

32. FriendFeed is an aggregator. It allows you to see friends’ (aka customers) activities on a whole bunch of different social networks.

33. Here’s a timeline of my social media activity. You can see that I joined the Science Debate cause on Facebook.

34. Here I can see the timeline of my friend Troy. He’s updated a blog, posted a couple of Tweets and bookmarked sites on Delicious. And I can see who else is following Troy’s updates

35. Ping.fm is a disseminator. With Ping you can update up to 30 social channels at the same time. You can use phone, instant messaging and even email, as well as your browser, to make updates.

36. Here are some of the sites supported by Ping.fm

39. By adopting a sound smart strategy you and your business can aim for the stars.