I was honored to be a featured speaker and panel facilitator on Wednesday at the Oklahoma City PRSA's 2007 Professional Development Day. Seems lots of folks -- even in conservative industries like oil and gas -- are beginning to gravitate toward new media.

My presentation focused on case studies of some of my clients, including Black Star and eDrugSearch.com.

I concluded with five quick tips for communicators who'd like to get the social media ball rolling, but aren't sure where to start.

They are:

1. Monitor blog mentions with Technorati and Google Alerts.

2. Sprinkle social media "fairy dust" on your news release distributions.

3. Make company news releases available by RSS.

4. Begin distributing and pitching to blogs (but carefully!)

5. Begin blogging internally to communicate to employees.

These steps amount to little more than putting a toe in the water -- but there's no reason why any communications department can't begin doing them today.