Once you have a blog, you can publish your RSS feed to multiple sites. On those sites, links can be shared and become visible to more people. Often, publishers will also bookmark their own content on sites like delicious to get more exposure.

The next pattern is a conversationalist pattern. This is for brand managers or anyone with a product or site that wants to know what is being said about their topic area on conversational hubs on the Internet. Three sites hot these days are Facebook, FriendFeed and Twitter. This is where early adopters are likely discussing your brand, and where you can participate in the conversation. Other tools like Google Alerts are useful for monitoring comments about your product or your topical keywords in order to address your customers (or readers) needs.

In actuality, you should probably implement all of the patterns describe here. But, if you are more concerned about broadcasting messages out to followers on social networks, Ping.fm is an excellent service for re-posting short messages from a central website. There is also an instant messenger connection, so you can very quickly publish to a wide number of services merely by sending an instant message.

For example, with Ping.fm, you can add Ping.fm as an instant messenger buddy and anytime there is something new to announce about your product or service, you send it via instant messenger to Ping.fm, which then re-posts it on Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter and many other services as a status update or as a micro blog post. This gives you tons of leverage and reach, if you can imagine just posting a very short message and having it re-posted on all these services, without you having to set up any feeds, you just set up your account details with Ping.fm.

The last hack is gives a publisher tremendous leverage. By connecting your Google Reader “Shared Items” feed to FriendFeed (or a service like TwitterFeed) you can automatically publish new content to your Twitter followers simply by clicking a single “share” button in Google Reader. Given that there is even an iPhone version of Google Reader, this means you can Tweet from the beach by just selecting content (not actually writing anything). This is an important and easy way to establish yourself as a trusted information source with existing and potential customers. Obviously, you want to “recommend” selectively so as to not overload your social network, but the key here is to be a relevant input to your prospect’s information stream.

If you have other Social Media hacks, or favorite configurations, please post them in the comments! The images in this post are also available as a SlideShare Presentation.