I’m honoured to have been chosen to take part in a round of blog tag discussing best practices for online social media. Thanks to Kim Woodbridge for the tag and to Mitch Joel for kicking off the project.

The posts so far have been focussed on remaining calm and not starting a troll-fest, with Kim recommending that we reflect, Ari Herzog saying pause before hitting the submit button and David Bradley saying we should be nice.

This is all good advice but as this is a technical blog, I will give you a technical response...

Automate!

I certainly don’t mean that you should use scripts to spam your blog into every social media service, but we responsible netizens can extend our presence by employing some clever automation.

There are, literally, thousands of on-line communities, blogs, digg-clones and forums, so we cannot keep an eye on them all without spreading our time too thinly. So I want a notification when I (or my brand) is mentioned, so I can follow up quickly.

You see, I found out that Kim had tagged me for this blog meme when an automated Google search for my name twittered that I’d been mentioned on a web page. I have similar alerts set up for a variety of keywords and can respond quickly thanks to the automated searches.

There are a surprising number of ways that automation can help you manage the firehose of information and social interaction that being an active participant in social media brings. Have you tried any of these?

• Import your blog into Facebook
• Ping Technorati whenever your blog is updated
• Read FriendFeed via RSS
• Twitter your Sphins
• Make a tumblr account and import your blog’s RSS feed

There are many, many, many more great tweaks and tips to succeeeding with social media, but mine is to automate.

Next...

I pass the baton on to the most beautiful people:

• The amazing eMom - she ROCKS a lot
• Erhan Erdogan has made FriendFeed his own

Oh, one more - Robert Scoble, c’mon baby tell us your best pratices for social media!