MySpace.com opened our eyes to the advancement of Web 2.0 with the social media craze. While blogging was a boom as it gave anyone who wanted to speak a voice, the social media tools provide the online community to to share their content in ways the stand alone blog couldn't reach. The new services such as Myspace.com, Digg, Del.icio.us, and many other social bookmark and sharing tools provide social marketing tools can even be more powerful than RSS feeds.

You don't need to send your amazing video into the local news station and hope they think it's newsworthy. The Internet has its own editorial vote process and anyone using social media tools has a vote. Welcome to the era of social media online. Magazine publishers might as well jump on board and allow their brand to help facilitate social media trend vs. trying to protect your content to be exclusively for the printed page. It's time to see your magazine brand as more that pictures and text.

Publishers should be covering the whole story and that means multimedia coverage of your brand. Your website, blog, podcast, and digital edition allow you to publish electronically anything that doesn't fit or print on paper. Your magazine brand core delivery may be print on paper for many years to come but that now is just one element of your cross media brand niche. Your print magazine is the tool to promote your online media.

Let's say you took video of an incredible snowboard jump at this years jump competition event. Why sure, you'll put the money image in your snowboard magazine as a 2 page spread feature lead, but now you've still got this great 1 minute video. So now, you can post an online version of the article with extra photos and insert the video right into the article. Once your video gets into the social media network, the online community will take care of sharing and spreading the word, bringing new traffic into your website to watch your video. This same concept applies to any content, video, articles, images, etc.

Video can also be uploaded to sites like YouTube.com, recently acquired by Google. In this case, your video is freely shared so you'll want to do some editing to brand the video with your own site URL in ending credits to get your just marketing value from sharing your content.

So, how do you start using social tools? Some popular social tagging tools are Del.icio.us, Digg, and Furl but many other are on the rise. One new tool, AddThis.com allows you to use one bookmark link to all your articles. AddThis alow you to put a Bookmark graphic just below your content. When a visitor click the button, they are prompted to select one of many social tools they favor to bookmark and share your site content. Remember, the shared bookmark still links back to your article or online content so others visitors will still need to visit your own site to see the full story or information that someone else has bookmarked. So what are you waiting for, open a free account with any of these social services and add the links to your own online content.