The key to understanding how to leverage the web2.0 craze and social media is to understand what you want to get out of it. Assigning specific goals before starting any type of campaign is import, it is doubly so in the new media world because it is extremely easy to become side tracked.

Branding, Links, Traffic, Influence, and Audience are usually the reason a business starts a social media campaign. Once you set your objectives in place it then becomes a fairly straight forward process to determine which social media strategies to use and which sites to target to generate your specified goals.

Social media strategies can include writing linkbait, blogging, producing podcasts, producing video, optimizing and posting images, and many other techniques. The end goal of any of these techniques is usually to attempt to create a buzz around the campaign and have it become viral. Once a campaign begins to go viral it can quickly get itself in front of a massive audience extremely quickly.

The challenge of taking a campaign from being an interesting aside to something everyone wants to share is massive. There is never a guarantee that even the most well thought out social media campaign will go viral, still the risk reward scenario in the social media realm is such that a single success can usually out weight the costs any previous failed campaigns.