I've been experimenting quite a bit over the last 18 months with way too many social networking tools. I realize that finding the time to experiment for many of us can be difficult, especially if those experiments do not lead to direct outcomes.
And, there is so much to experiment that one person or organization can't do it alone.
I don't think there is a cookie-cutter approach yet -- a fish to toss at you. Sorry. It takes some action learning, small focused experiments where you track, evaluate, and learn from before investing more time and effort. Or even to convince someone else of the proof of concept. Choosing which of these tools to adopt starts with outcomes, strategy, message, and knowing your audience - and nothing to do with the tools. So the issue is more how to best match your strategy, outcomes, and audience with the right tool and what type of simple experiment can you set up and what will you learn?
While there are some obvious easy tools to get started with first, like Flickr, for example, you have to be ready to invest a little bit of time in some thoughtful experimentation.
1. Ignore the tools: Figure out your outcomes, strategy, and message and determine whether your audience or the audience you want to reach can be accessed via one of these social networking tools. There is enough secondary research published either via blog posts or research hubs about who uses these tools. Take advantage of that information.
2. The rule of threes: Identify and explore a tool and commit to learning three things about it in three weeks with at least three other people in your organization or your peers. Make it fun. Most of these tools are not difficult to learn how to use, but it does take some "play time" or "getting to know you time." What you are looking for is how best to interact with the community as well as the techniques. Katya Andresen has written a fantastic five minute guide to social networking tools. Read it.
3. Set up a small experiment: It doesn't have to an exhaustive experiment. Define something small and tangible - whether it be a Flickr photo contest or exploring the content related to your organization's issue and identifying 10 friends or contacts. Identify 2-3 questions you want to answer from your experiment.
4. Set a Time Frame, Track it and Talk about it: Make sure you activate the tracking system or install an external tracking system like site meter, bloglog, or Google Analytics. Look at your data for answers. In addition, have a conversation with the three people who joined you - what did you learn? What should you bring forward? Should you trash this tool and go onto a different one?
Source: http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2006/11/meet_tuesday_fr.html