I was invited to speak to McMaster University Advancement about using social media tools for professional development, both personally and as an organization. I introduced and spoke about twitter, linkedin, facebook, second life and youtube. It was a whirlwind tour, but I hope I was able to inspire some new ideas. Take home message: social media offers alternative means to reach and communicate with users via free and relatively easy-to-use tools. Having said that, monitoring and maintaining these tools takes work and planning – it is not enough to simply create them.

One aspect that I didn’t get to discuss at all, really, was that of ‘management’ or organization. For twitter, at least, there are a number of clients or websites available that often do a much better job of handling tweets than twitter.com does. On Mac, I’ve become quite enamoured with tweetie, but you can find plugins for Firefox, or chat programs with built-in twitter support. itweet.net is a great web-based alternative.

On a larger scale of management is FriendFeed, a website that collects your information from a number of social media sites, including twtitter, facebook, flickr, picasa, etc., etc. Those that like FriendFeed like it a lot, so it is worth investigating.