You’re a small business or freelancer and you’ve got a lot to do. You look after existing clients, there is admin, developing and improving your offerings oh and engage with prospects. Sound familiar? Now everyone is asking whether you have a social network presence. Organizations and freelancers are scared of being forgotten, missing out and not engaging.

You see people stumbling along, uncertain of their direction, following the herd, often headed by an elite few. My mind boggles at how people can attend a conference to blog, tweet, photograph essentially their competitors. Sure it's generating content on their social networks, and there is often the hope of being acknowledged by the elite in that field (especially in the website design / ownership and blogging worlds) , one day to feed off the 'elites' breadcrumbs or join their ranks. New connections, new opportunities and new knowledge at conferences is important. As a 'side effect' it can contribute to your online social presence, but there are ways to proceed, something many are ignoring. Promoting your competition shouldn't even be a consideration, no matter how nice and welcoming they are.

There also appears to be a fashion to try and be ‘hip’, where being a startup is a badge to be worn with pride, not fear, even a year or so after company formation. Tweeting how busy you are, how great you are as an individual, how much you travel, how tired you are due to work, doesn't inspire confidence and attract customers. The photos on flickr of the quirky office, the office BBQ, the casual relaxed dress sense. Why not do a lip sync video on youtube, it’s fun! This means something right? It is surely demonstrating the right image? Just because you can share something, doesn't mean you should.

At the other end of the scale you find blogs on life support, with rare updates and probably not attracting much traffic. You find stale articles, seen before, rarely remembered, never bookmarked. Social network accounts seem abandoned. What does this say about the business?

Then you have those that over communicate. Some people flood twitter and facebook with nonsense, recycled articles in a bid to gain attention. Some try and sell the person, rather than the product, but are following thousands and engage with a select group, rather than seek out prospects. Automated links and tweets to new connections, vaguely aware themselves until someone speaks up. Others try and sell the product, but forget it’s a social network.

You lose sense of direction, your told you need a presence on facebook. You wonder why tweeting isn’t working for you, your doing what many others are doing. There is something new called chum.ly? "Wait I didn’t get my head around myspace yet! What that’s so yesterday? But it has over 200 million users…." Your find yourself lost and every direction looks like a mountain to climb.

Part 2 will help you discover your own path and climb a few of those mountains.

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