Based on my expertise in the area (shameless plug), I’ve compiled 6 main areas to focus on when you’re putting pen to paper:

Goals and Objectives – Every company has different goals and objectives for social media. Hopefully, through your interview process you’ve determined what’s important. Regardless, you should set up several brainstorming and discovery meetings with your superiors to develop a set of goals and objectives that you can use throughout the social media planning process. We’ve seen a wide range, including increasing website traffic, creating a Facebook community and generating revenue.

Internal Education – The best way to start is to focus on your company’s internal social media education. Do you have a social media policy or best practices document? Something that employees can follow and refer to when participating in social networks and engaging customers. Making sure everyone is on the same page with how the company wants to be protrayed online is a must.

Research and Analysis – Now that you have your employees on the same page, it’s time to figure out who’s talking about your company and where. A wide range of applications are out there that can help, including social media monitoring tools Radian6 and Trackur. Set up an account, determine your company’s keywords and phrases, then start tracking where and when conversations are occurring on a daily basis. The information you gather will help you figure out where you need to place your social media efforts to reach your audience.

Blogging – “Content is King,” blah blah blah. While you might hear it a lot, it’s absolutely true. If you can continously create relivent and thought provoking content, there is no reason why you and your company can’t be the next New York Times and get the same kind of traffic. Yes, that might be an exaggeration, but a blog is still a great way to create and distribute content to your potential customers. Not to mention that search engines love new and fresh content – meaning higher search rankings.

Social Sites – With millions of people as users, Facebook and Twitter can be powerful tools to distribute your content and engage to create a community. The community you create can be an powerful tool in several ways, including constantly engaging consumers using your company’s products or services, but also enabling them to be advocates of your company to their networks.

Campaigns – Now that you have all the basics set up and running efficiently, how about creating some campaigns to get your blog, social sites and products/services out there to the right audience. Do some research and see what your competitors and other industry leaders are doing for campaigns. Also, think about who your audience is and what they like/dislike. Remember, use your social media research to help influence these decisions.

I can recommend several third-party applications that can help, including Offerpop and Wildfire – two applications that allow users to run social campaigns on Facebook. These are great tools for gettin your campaign idea to your audience in a fun and interactive way.

Note: It takes a lot more than the above to put together a social media plan, but I am so nice I figured I’d help you start.

What else should a social media plan include?

I’m somewhat torn on this situation. On the first hand, a parent is probably pretty concerned with what’s going on with their kids via Facebook. We saw recently what words can do when a young women hung herself after countless hours of teasing in school and on Facebook. So, in that sense, I understand why this mother wanted to check up on her son. But, did you have to log in to his profile to do this? No, just create a profile like all the other parents have done and virtually stalk. Also, why not be sneaky about it. Just log in and check things out. No need to post, right? Obviously you’d get busted!

I guess in the end if it’s under your roof, using your internet connection and on the computer you bought – I think you should be able to do whatever you want. If my kid was 16 and tried to sue me for anything, I’d ship him to military school so fast he’d wish he’d never heard of Facebook.

What are your thoughts? Do you side with the mother or son?

I’d say that the Safety Mode is really for parents to turn on, lock and keep their kids from seeing the realities of the world – the so called “protective bubble” that every parent tries to achieve. In the long run, I think it’s a good idea. I mean it’s an option, either use or don’t.

Just imagine that by the end of 2010 just about everyone with a cellphone is running a Google software or hardware. With that, couldn’t google literally have access to everyone’s cellphones and couldn’t they potentially triangulate everyone in the world using some hidden technology they have under the Google headquarters??? My answer, yes.

So, what does this mean? I don’t know. Lets go with “transparency is dead” or “Google rules the world.” But I thought it would be cool to compare Google to Batman because let’s be honest, who doesn’t want to be Batman.

To that extent, there has been a growing theme that leaves me a bit unsettled with those active users among us. It’s hard to imagine when you look at sites like TechCrunch or Mashable, that the hundreds if not thousands of retweets they receive are legitimate users reading their posts and forwarding to their Twitter networks.

I propose there’s something else going on and that is that users, rushed on time and trying to stay up to date in the Twitterverse, are automatically tweeting posts from these sites. I’m dubbing this the “auto-retweet”.

Why would they do this you ask? Well, I can think of two main reasons. First, it creates the impression that they are an “active” user. I can imagine some people get anxious when they haven’t tweeted for a few hours and they don’t want people to think they aren’t important or don’t have something to say. Second, it positions themselves as someone who is in the “know” on all that is happenings within technology, business or social media – especially breaking news.

I’ll tell a little anonymous story – which is how this post came about. Someone was telling me that an online publication had made a post and people were retweeting its original tweet (these publications automatically send out a tweet from their handle when a post is published). So, the original tweet that received initially hundreds of re-tweets was in fact linking to nothing. Something happened to the link where it was “dead.” It never connected to the post. So, why would hundreds of readers retweet an inactive link? Because they were auto-tweeting. The worst part isn’t even the auto-tweet, but the fact that these users obviously didn’t even read the post! *sign*

I wouldn’t say this is a huge issue, but the fact that people are automatically retweeting content defeats the purpose of Twitter and the networks we form. I highly doubt people follow me because they know i’m going to retweet everything coming out of a specific source. No, they follow me because I provide them with conversation and content that’s relevant to themselves.  It’s all about the context.

We should all take a step back, slow down and think about our tweets. This will help to reduce the number of auto-retweets as well as other junk tweets and give us a more manageable Twitter. One where I don’t have to unfollow people because its becoming hectic, but rather can enjoy the well throughout and conceptualized thoughts of others.

Note: The example provided above is not from VentureBeat, a publication I contribute to occasionally.

This report, answers that question and it’s an answer that companies are going to like to hear. Basically, the more you engage with social media the higher your profits and sales can be. Two examples – Starbucks and Dell who interact daily across multiple channels with an audience and have seen stable if not increases profits.

Check out the report here and let me know your thoughts on whether increases sales and profit is the key to pushing more companies into social media. Personally, I don’t think it should be, but you can’t deny the power.

Yesterday, another semi-list function was launched by Google. Now, I understand it’s not really a “list” feature, but if you compare it to what other social sites are doing, I think I can make the case. Google is now allowing users to create their own news sections using key words. Basically, if I’m interested in all news on “global trade” I can put together keys works that are associated with such and boom – a global trade news LIST. See, I told you I could do it.

All in all, I’d say we are a society of lists. Whether it’s Twitter, Google, groceries or music – we LOVE lists. Keep a tab on the evolution of lists and what social factors start to come into play to take them to the next level!

Many rely on the popular Gmail email service and don’t use Outlook or other email formats otherwise found in a business setting.  Gmail is a great resource as it’s free and gives you many of the same capabilities as traditional services. However, in the past there has been one feature missing from Gmail that appears in other email services: the recall button. While not necessarily new news, I wanted to take the time to point out that Gmail now has a “recall” feature, or more appropriately labeled “undo.”

The undo feature allows users a 5 second window after they hit the send button to recall their email. Now, there are a whole hosts of reasons why you may want to recall an email. Reasons could include: an incorrect recipient, wrong draft email or possibly a previously missed spelling error. For whatever reason, I can safely say that most of us at one point in time have pushed the send button and immediately said “oh crap.”

Gmail also has a similar function– a service that once activated makes you solve a series of math problems and only allows your email to go out during specific hours (which default to Friday and Saturday nights). The service is supposed to stop “drunk emailing” using the notion that if you’re drunk it will be hard to do math and may deter you to not send an inappropriate email and falls in line as a preventative measure for Gmail users.

Says Michael Leggett, User Experience Designer, “This feature can’t pull back an email that’s already gone; it just holds your message for five seconds so you have a chance to hit the panic button. And don’t worry – if you close Gmail or your browser crashes in those few seconds, we’ll still send your message.”

For the skeptics out there saying that individuals should be responsible enough workers to check and double check their emails, Google included some statistics to justify the undo button. The study showed that 87% of executives reported they have mistakenly sent or received an email or other electronic message.

Email is an important aspect to our daily routine and, if you’re using Gmail, you now have the capabilities to join the other masses who have the option to recall or undo an email. Because, let’s face it, we are all human and humans make mistakes.