At many of the presentations I’ve given recently about social media, the one I question I hear repeatedly is, “How do you find the time?“

The time question is especially relevant for people who work for companies — you do have a job to do.

And, you don’t want to waste spend a lot of company time on something that’s not a proven marketing tactic or that hasn’t been approved of by management.

The question is also relevant for consultants and freelancers, as Alan Weiss points out in his excellent post, “What Price Glory? Or: Can We Get Some Air in Here? ^[2]“

In his post, Alan lists a number of results-oriented marketing activities you can do in place of social media. (It’s a great list so be sure to read his post.)

I think, however, that people are asking the wrong question.

Instead of asking, “How do I find the time?” you should ask, “What do I want to get from social media?” and then devise a strategy based on your objective/s.

Once you have your strategy nailed down, you can then implement it based on your available time (and staff) resources. Having a strategy will also keep you focused.

If you’re a corporate marketer, for example, and your company has yet to make a foray into social media, your objective may be to simply follow a few bloggers in your industry as well as keep abreast of what people are saying about your company or industry in general.

Your strategy then, is easy to implement and incorporate into your work flow:

Find a few bloggers to follow — Do a search on Google or Technorati using industry keywords to find relevant bloggers: i.e. Healthcare IT consultants, MEMS manufacturing blogs, etc.

Some blogs, such as TechCrunch ^[3], have become “must read” blogs for people in specific industries. Other blogs may not be as influential ^[4] but you’ll find lots of excellent information plus links to other influential bloggers.

To easily follow blogs, set up a Google Reader ^[5] or Bloglines ^[6] account.

These applications make it easy to follow blogs as you’ll receive the RSS feeds in one place versus having to check in constantly for updated posts.

Join LinkedIn Groups — You can find hundreds of Groups on LinkedIn for all types of industries and topics. A search for “Healthcare IT” yields 1,607 Groups. A search for “MEMS” yields 33 very targeted Groups.

Once you find a two or three Groups that appeal to you and that include your customers or potential customers, join them and then follow the discussions.

You’ll learn your customers’ challenges, you’ll see who are some of the players, and you’ll find new blogs to follow as many people now incorporate their blogs into their LinkedIn profiles.

Some groups are more active than others and not all Groups have ongoing discussions, so join only the active ones.

Look for forums where your customers hang out — Every industry has a forum where people of a like mind congregate. You can join these forums without having to participate. As with LinkedIn, once you join, you can follow discussions and get to know what your customers and potential customers are talking about — including what they’re saying about your company.

Use Twitter Search — Set up an RSS feed on Twitter Search ^[7] for your company name and/or products. Whenever someone uses these terms, you’ll be alerted via your Google Reader or Bloglines account.

Set up Google Alerts for your company and product names — Google Alerts ^[8] works this way: any time a specific search phrase is used in a blog post, Web content, online news article, video or podcast, you’ll receive an Alert from Google via email with a link to the content.

This saves you the time of having to do a manual search. You can set up an Alert in about two seconds and can have as many Alerts as you want.

That’s it — you are now ready to follow what’s being said about your company quite easily — without having to spend hours doing so.

In addition, once you begin getting a feel for social media and how it works, you can then revise your objective and strategy and begin participating by leaving comments on blogs, opening a Twitter account, and participating in LinkedIn discussions.

Tomorrow I’ll cover how consultants and freelancers can use social media more effectively.