Here’s a social marketing plan to build your brand on the social bookmarking and social networking websites:

1. Be there or be square. The value of social media is in the relationships. Online relationships are just like offline relationships. If you aren’t there, you have no relationship. If you work at finding friends for 5 days, then go away for 6 weeks and come back, it’s not the same. You can’t just pick up right where you left off. That’s not how “social” works, online or offline.

You have to apply consistent, day-to-day attention, or you’ll just waste your time. And the more consistent you are, the more you remind people of your brand. Your market can potentially find you through every action you do. So be active on the social marketing websites. Every action you take opens the door for people to connect with your website or your blog or you.

2. Speaking of consistent – if you want to use the social media, it’s good to REALLY learn a handful of social bookmarking or social networking sites. Choose the same username for each. This increases your presence, gets you more notice, makes you more … social. If you want to promote your blog, maybe you focus on Technorati, StumbleUpon, and Digg. Start out by targeting 10 minutes a day on each, and do it. Keep a consistent message across all your social marketing profiles, consistent voice, style, topics you cover, avatar, etc. Doing this reinforces both your image and your brand.

3. Support the entire StumbleUpon community … or whichever sites you focus on. If you spend time on a forum, you’ll sometimes hear the guests grouse about the “drive-bys”. Those are the forum visitors who post once about whatever it is they’re promoting and then disappear for months … until they post about the next thing they’re promoting. They add no value to the group. They have no sense of community. They are looked on as scum by the “residents”. It’s tempting to just promote yourself. Millions of people use these sites. But what actually happens is, people take more notice of you when you become a useful social marketing resource. And that entices other social networkers to share your blog and speed up your popularity. If all you ever do is point to yourself, those others won’t participate as much.

4. Ride the “social” wave. If you do the first 3 items on this list, then you will have put yourself in position for #4. When your social marketing appears consistently across several social media and you demonstrate your desire to give people the best results possible when they search your niche, you will build a following.

And, of course, that’s why you joined most of these social marketing sites in the first place.

The aspect of LinkedIn with the greatest leverage is the ability to connect quickly (and sometimes emotionally) with powerful centers of influence whom you’ve never met. A strong social networking connection with the right person could change your life forever … maybe a lot of lives.

Bill Gates has asked a question at LinkedIn:

“How can we do more to encourage young people to pursue careers in science and technology?”

Wouldn’t it be worth your while – and fun, too! – to plan a continuing strategy of connecting with the movers and shakers in your field? Forum communities offer a lot of opportunities. Every social networking platform has its “big dogs.” How might it affect your future if your thoughtful contribution at LinkedIn Answers captured the imagination of one of the top people in your field?

It happens every day. Someone makes a quantum leap because they suddenly connected to someone who is REALLY connected. And as you make those efforts at LinkedIn and at forum communities or other social networking hotspots, you will get better and better at the strategy. As you read the responses of others who use the same strategy, you’ll get more of an idea of how to focus your response to strengthen your contribution.

Do you think Bill Gates will read these answers at LinkedIn? I’ll bet he does. Do you think a ton of other well-connected people will participate and also read these answers? I’ll bet they do. So here is just one of many social networking chances you have to leap-frog your competition. Answer Bill Gates’ LinkedIn question and REALLY nail it!

Answer Bill Gates’ Question

Flickr is a very useful tool to social bloggers, because a blog post with an image starts out with a definite advantage over a blog post with no image. A picture book is easier to read than “War and Peace.” The image on your blog post will draw in people who wouldn’t have stopped otherwise. And a GOOD image will make your words more memorable, more effective long-term.

Flickr hosts a seemingly endless stream of images, and you can freely use many of them for social marketing, no strings attached. Many images can be used commercially. You can even modify many of these photos. What’s the catch? Just give attribution to the photographer … a link under the image, back to their website.

If you also need photos for your commercial blog, go to Flickr and search only within the Creative Commons photo area … millions of photos are available for commercial use. Just click on the “Attribution License” category to find photos available for commercial use and which you can modify as you like.

Now click on “browse popular tags” and click on the appropriate keywords. If you don’t find them, use the Flickr “Search” box to enter keywords about the image you’re looking for. It may take more than 1 search (different keywords) to find what you want. When you see a result you like, click to see the full-size image. If you like it, then clicking “some rights reserved” brings up the Creative Commons license.

If everything checks out, download the image and use it on your blog as you want. Be sure to add a photographer credit under the image (“Photo by …”). Link the photographer name to their Flickr profile page.

A social marketing friend was playing around one day and discovered a new way to leverage the social content he writes. There are few things more satisfying than to get MORE use out of content you’ve already created.

Anyway, he dipped into his social blogging archive, back to April about 2 years ago. He published 14 articles that month. So he opened that file, and he opened a new text file. And then he took one paragraph at random from the first blog post and pasted it into the text file. He copied a random paragraph from the 2nd blog post and pasted it into the text file. He copied a random paragraph from the third blog post … well, you get the idea. He copied 8 paragraphs from 8 blog posts, then closed the blog archive to see what he had.

And you know what? This new “article” wasn’t half bad. The social content almost made sense as-is (or as-was). My friend chose a couple of new keywords to focus the article. Then he went into each paragraph, changed a word here, a sentence there, smoothed it all a bit, and in 5 minutes, he had a finished product. Sure, it sounds crazy. But try it … I’ll bet you can really leverage all your past years of social blogging.

Some other leveraging ideas:

• Look over your past blog posts for the best of the best. Take one that’s really good, get out your video cam, and film a 2-3 minute segment. Upload it to YouTube. Link to it from your site and MySpace and LinkedIn and any other social networking profiles you have.
• Keep track of every question that is emailed in to support, and every answer you give. Some of these Q & As probably suggest a “how-to” video you can do. Others may be appropriate to combine into a blog post.
• Outline an ebook you want to write. Write out the title for each chapter and section. Now write your blog posts with each of those titles as the headline. In maybe 2-4 weeks, you’ll have an ebook.
• If you have an active blog readership, do one blog where you ask questions about what resources people use to achieve certain results, or why they choose product A over product B. Then compile the results into a report to entice new readers.

To squeeze every last penny’s worth out of every single thing you do, plan ahead. Before you do it, whatever it is, think what other uses your social content could have. Blog. Article directory. Video. Podcast. Comment on someone else’s blog post. Ebook chapter. Free report for new subscribers. A somewhat different spin gives you a whole new article. The more you target multi-purpose content production, the more effective you will become.

There was a time when having a good social marketing network was a great asset. Today, it’s a 100% necessity. You can be certain your competition is constantly using online resources to build their own strong, experienced, knowledgable, wise, nimble network. With today’s avalanche of information heading your way, you’d better have not only a great network, but also a great way to quickly sample lots of good stuff, or you will spend your life sorting through garbage.

Tumblr.com is a micro-blogging utility. The idea is to build a social network of connoisseurs who pick through the information smorgasbord, delivering you only the tastiest snacks.

You have the option to host this social blogging platform on your own domain. You can use Tumblr to quickly post small bites of text, pictures, audio, video, & links. It’s similar to Twitter. Every person in your social network becomes your own personal editor, constantly focusing on content to publish only targeted key points, deciding this resource is important and that one is not. Then YOU glance at each thumbnail and instantly decide whether to look deeper.

Similar to the idea of the Blog Marketing Journal – but much shorter.

This is as easy and quick as social networking gets. You don’t even have to go to the Tumblr website. Just click on a toolbar icon to post a quote, picture, content, etc. You can even post content from mobile phones. It’s perfect for a large segment of the population that doesn’t want to spend their time writing a detailed blog post.

You can also feature as many as 5 RSS feeds, which means you can leverage the time you put into your social blogging. Tumblr is well-positioned to help solve your information overload problem, while making social networking much more productive for you.