As the New Mexico Business Weekly reports, earlier this week I was part of a panel of experts who spoke to the New Mexico Advertising Federation about social media.

Other panelists included Sophie Martin of Duke City Fix, Nora Heineman-Fleck of UNM, Greta Weiner of GWDC, and surprise guest Leah Etling of Santa Barbara community blog edhat.com.

In the interest of full disclosure: I’m really not an expert on social media, I’m just a nerd. And I’m not even a very good one at that. But I know a little about this stuff and I like sharing. So during the panel I talked about our site as well as MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and how businesses and organizations can best use social media.

I talked specifically about my own addiction to Twitter, the shocking number of high school boyfriends I’m friends with on Facebook and how hard I work to keep my professional contacts on Facebook from seeing embarrasing drunk photos of me posted by my friends.

I also talked about our NMI webcasting and liveblogging efforts, and how important it is to make your readers/customers/fans feel connected. Bringing our readers into the reporting process gives us a better final product and our readers love it.

Here are some of the suggestions that I jotted down before the panel, a few of which I was able to share, and a few I didn’t have time to mention.

1) First, if you sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed, you need to be using social media for work. That means yes, you need a Web site. And you need to be using social media to promote that Web site. Get on Facebook today. And make sure you have “Share this” boxes on your site, so visitors can post your information to their own sites and pages.

2) Use social media for crowdsourcing. Do you want to know what people think of your new logo? Ask 400 Facebook friends or Twitter followers and you’ve got a huge focus group to give you the answer. Ask them what new flavor of ice cream you should make, what kinds of books you should stock, what kinds of services you should offer or if they’ve ever been ripped off by a credit card company. They’ll respond.

3) If you use Facebook for personal and professional reasons, you must figure out a way to manage the difficult intersections between the two. In part, that means using the privacy settings to prevent the embarrassing photo problem. See this article for excellent step-by-step directions.

4) Do you need to use Twitter? Not if you don’t have anything useful to say. Twitter is fantastic for journalists, news junkies and tech-savvy people with very specific interests. For example, I use Twitter to get breaking news from dozens of journalists and news organizations I “follow” on Twitter, and I use it to follow a select group of chefs, restaurant owners and food writers. But many businesses haven’t yet figured out how to use the site well. You will need to be newsy, funny, newsy and funny or useful to survive on Twitter. Straight up advertising simply doesn’t work because people are under no obligation to look at your messages, or “tweets.”

5) If you do decide to tweet, consider linking your Twitter account to your Facebook page. Here’s a tutorial. It will save you time, but remember that your followers on Twitter may be a different audience than your Facebook friends. Keep that in mind.

6) Follow us on Twitter! NMI has its own feed @NMIndependent. I’m @gwynethdoland, Matthew Reichbach is @fbihop, Trip Jennings is @trip_44, Heath Haussamen is @haussamen, Marjorie Childress is @m_ruth and David Alire Garcia is not on Twitter! Can you believe that?

If you have more suggestions for how to use social media to promote your work, put them in the comments section below.