During my career as a Web strategy consultant I've often had people ask me, "How do I do social media?" Unfortunately the answer isn't simple. But the first step is the same as if you developing any other marketing strategy: know your market. To "know your market" in the old days you needed a $15,000 qualitative market research study that would then need to be quantified for the likes of senior management. The customer research effort was time consuming and expensive.

Most of us know how to use Twitter to follow, tweet, retweet, @reply and direct message our friends and colleagues. However, not many of us employ Twitter as a research tool. Here is how:

1. Go to search.twitter.com
2. Type in keywords in relation to your product, service or topic. For example: ReadWriteWeb, RWW, @RWW, #RWW.
3. Read the conversation.