I have my strategy for promoting my brand - “SusanBratton/DishyMix.” I podcast, then blog about the shows, then promote them via Facebook and Twitter. It’s not perfect, and yes, I could surely do more. But in the time I have, that group of platforms and actions feels right to me for now. If you are still struggling to decide what social strategy to use for your brand, I have a great idea for you.

I gained some empathy for souls less tech savvy than I while presenting at both the Aloha Social Media Summit and the Personal Life Media Social Media Training Day. I understand how bewildering the social web can be.

If you don’t have the luxury of getting personalized training by Andy Beal, Dave Taylor, Susan Bratton or others like us, you can develop a social media strategy to promote your brand by reading Dave Evans’ book, Social Media: An Hour A Day.

Dave takes you on a tour of various categories of social media from blogs and WIKIs to multimedia sites like Flickr, YouTube and Personal Life Media to tagging services like Stumble Upon and Delicious to microblog platforms like Twitter and Pownce. Through hands-on experience, you can compare the attributes of Facebook with LinkedIn and MySpace and Plaxo.

He helps you see how you can aggeregate competitive intelligence and how to manage your online reputation with Google Blog Search and Nielsen Buzzmetrics. (Note: I am a proponent of a very inexpensive service called Trackur. I killed my free Google Alerts and signed up for Trackur. If you click on THIS link, my friend Andy can track your order and will double the number of saved searches for any of my DishyMix friends’ accounts.)

Once you’ve used Social Media: An Hour a Day to take tours of all these sites and services and you’ve read along with Dave’s companion information, you have a pretty darn good idea of the role these social marketing options play. You can then go through a Touchpoints Analysis of your brand with a cool worksheet Dave provides. Then you actually build your own social media campaign! Again, with a great worksheet to keep you moving elegantly through the process. Finally, you create your business objectives, metrics and ROI on the last handy worksheet and you will have tied your social media plan to your company’s largest business ojbectives.

If you actually deliver on the rigor required to think through these worksheets you will have a bomb proof, totally defensible social media strategy for your brand.

You might buy a box of these books as I know you will want to tear out whole sections and hand them out around your company. This is the kind of book that should be in a 3-ring binder with multiple copies of the worksheets for use by all the members on your team.

I interviewed Dave on DishyMix. Here is the episode and transcript.

Dave Evans, Digital VooDoo on Interruptus Vulgaris, Trusting “The Cloud” and Social Media: An Hour A Day