What Social Media should I use personally?

You’ve heard that Social Media is all the craze.  You’ve even joined Facebook and gathered all of your high school and college “friends”.  Congrats on your start.  However, now you think that you have some ideas, causes, or maybe even an agenda that you personally want to get out to the world.  You think everyone should care about your favorite charity or you think it would be nice for the grandparents to be able to keep up with what’s going on with the grandkids.

The problem is you don’t know where to start. You heard in the office one day that blogging is dead. (If you are up on Wired magazine then you even know that the Web is Dead.)  You heard that Twitter is for celebrities or finding out that someone is eating a hamburger.  You don’t take a lot of pictures and you think that Flickr is not for you.  You don’t know what Plaxo, Ning, or even what Google Buzz is about. And you simply just need someone to tell you where to start.

So we sit down over lunch or breakfast and you ask me, “What Social Media should I be using?” (this is on a personal level and not business, that post will come later)

I then start asking the following questions:

1. What type of person are you? Do you like to develop your ideas?  Or do you prefer short and sweet to the point messages?

2. Do you like to shoot and edit video? Take and share pictures?

3. Do you want this new outlet of information to update your Facebook profile?

4. Are you hoping that people interact with your information or are you just hoping to post and forget?

5. What is your expected time investment?

6. Do you engage in other social media outside of Facebook already?

This is not to psychoanalyze you and your relationship with your family’s history but to set real expectations.  It is also to help set some type of strategy for your personal goals of getting out the information.

Once I have this information from above then I can go into where I think you should start and what your strategy should be.

So let’s try it.

Go ahead and answer the above questions in the comments.  I will then take your answers and suggest what social media you should be on and talk about some type of strategy for you.