I've presented a great deal of information in my series on Leveraging Social Media for SEO (click at left to see all posts in this series).  It may be a bit overwhelming to know how to get started and where to focus your efforts first, so let me give you some pointers.

First of all, as with all marketing efforts, the ideal approach is to do research and develop a social media strategy that considers your corporate goals and target audience before doing anything else.  If you can actually do this, good for you!  But if your company, like mine, is moving too fast to do this, I suggest you just go ahead and dive in!

Set up profiles - play with the social media sites, learn, adjust, tweak, and chip away at it.  This doesn't mean you should do anything stupid or inappropriate, of course (you may want to revisit my post on What Not To Do), but I know too many people get "analysis paralysis" and there's a real danger in not doing anything.  Better to start out rudimentarily, learn, and enhance as you go than to fail to start at all.

With that, I've divided the tactics in this series into four categories, roughly in order of priority (assuming that we all have limited time and want to focus first on where we can get the most bang for the proverbial buck).  These categories are based on my opinion, so your mileage may vary.  Also, keep in mind that they're in priority by results in terms of search engine optimization only.  As I've stated before, there are endless other reasons to engage in social media besides SEO, so strategic considerations may mean it makes sense for you to reorder my list.

Fast Tactics That Provide Direct Results

- LinkedIn Profiles (personal and business)

- Squidoo (lensmaster profile, submit existing articles, create a lens for your business/product)

- Optimized Press Releases (use PR Web at the $200 level, which allows you to control anchor text)

Fast Tactics That Provide Some or Indirect Results

- Facebook and Plaxo (maybe MySpace) profiles (personal and business)

- YouTube & Flickr (repurpose existing videos [corporate, product, training, interviews] and photos [product, facilities, executives, events].  Also set up a YouTube channel and Flickr account for your business)

- HubPages and Knol (upload existing articles)

Tactics That Take Time But Are Worth It

- Corporate blog

- Twitter

- YouTube & Flickr (create videos/photos based on in-demand content or targeted keywords)

- StumbleUpon

- Squidoo, HubPages & Knol (create new content regularly)

Tactics That Take A Great Deal of Time and/or Offer Less Value

- Posting comments on others' blogs (takes time to find worthwhile blogs and posts for comments, one at a time)

- Digg (takes serious participation and engagement in the community to see results)

- Delicious (doesn't take much time but doesn't offer much benefit)

When I began this series a few months ago, I had no idea it would take me this long to finish.  I hope it was worth the wait and that you've gotten some good information that you can use.  That's all she wrote!