In a recent post by Harry Gold at ClickZ, he lists seven components of your social media strategy that are critical for you to understand and use throughout your social media strategy.

1. Paid media – You advertise through social media sites. You buy your way into the sight of your customer.
2. Profiles – Create a profile for your company on one or all of these big social networking sites – Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace – then keep your profile up to date constantly adding information to show your customers that you’re an active member of the site.
3. Channels – If you have a lot of media, put it out there. Create a page on YouTube, or upload your photos up to a Flickr account. Once your videos and photos are out there, people can begin posting them to their site, and your information can freely flow, spreading the awareness of your company.
4. Gadgets/Wigets – These are useful applications for your site. If they’re catchy, and people like them, they’ll post them on different sites, letting your gadget spread the word about your company through other people.
5. Chicklets – The buttons on your webpages that spread the word. This is your RSS feed button, your bookmark on del.icio.us button, and all those other things that will spread the word about your site.
6. Blogging and blog outreach – Start a blog. Continue writing the blog, and also find others that blog about what you’re writing about. Keep up with their blogs, and make comments, and they’ll read your blog
7. Crowd Sourcing – Through all the sources you now have, ask your readers a question. Let them know you care about their opinion, and even give a prize or to out so they know you’re listening to them.