When Rich Brooks from Flyte New Media asked be to be a part of the Social Media FTW conference as a speaker I was surprised. I'm a humble radio DJ who has eaten cat food on my show. Not exactly who you'd expect to be lumped into a group of speakers with a vast knowledge of social media.

I accepted though and was glad I did. How much useful information I gave at the Social Media and Traditional Media panel with the Portland Press Herald's Justin Ellis is debatable, but the experience was fantastic.

If you couldn't make the Social Media FTW conference or were in one of the other great concurrent sessions, let me fill you in on what I shared about how Q97.9 radio uses social media.

• One of the first social media tools we began to use was podcasting. People use DVR's to time shift when they watch their favorite TV shows, so why not the same with radio. We post the Q Morning Show in its entirety minus the music and commercials, and publish it on wjbq.com where people can download or listen to in their browser, and on iTunes where they can subscribe to automatically receive new episodes that they can sync to their iPods or iPhone to listen on the go. This gave us another avenue for sponsorship within the podcast and on the podcast page on the website.

• We began to use You Tube as a great way for our listeners to get a behind the scenes look at what we do on the radio that up until video on the web, was only heard. We created our own channel on You Tube and embedded our videos on wjbq.com. We also use it to in conjunction with our clients for value added to their advertising campaigns like this video in conjunction with Funtown/Splashtown USA.

• Using a free website called UStream we started running a live web cam from our studio during The Q Morning Show. UStream lets anyone with a webcam and an Internet connection easily send live video to the web. This let our listeners get an even greater behind the scenes look during our show. In addition to live streaming, UStream also lets you save video that can be embedded on other websites. When Senator Susan Collins was on our show shortly after John Edwards announced he had an affair and questions arose about his paternity to a child, Senator Collins addressed it by saying "Don't you think he is the father of the child?" We struck gold. Our video made it to all three local television stations, The Portland Press Herald, ABCnews.com and even was featured on Fox News. Our brand went nationwide all because we thought to turn on a camera. If you want a viral video, always have a camera and shoot everything you think has the potential to be interesting. You never know.

• We use Flickr, a free photo sharing website, that gives us the ability to upload pictures and video taken with cell phones. This allows us to instantly drive traffic to our website if we have anything interesting that our listeners might like to see, be it in the studio or on location

• We have several Facebook fan pages to help us connect with our listeners. One for The Q Morning Show where we can announce things that people may have missed on the air, such as a discount on Kelly Clarkson tickets for one day only. It also lets us post pictures, video and our podcast that will show up on the Facebook pages of our fans. Facebook also provides a feature called insights which allows you to get a snapshot of who your fans are.

• We just recently launched a station Twitter page, which is just another way to reach our listeners. Those same special deals an announcements can be tweeted, and for some show up instantly on their cell phones. Public conversations can take place with listeners and we can get instant feedback on what we're doing.

Radio has always been interactive, but with social networking it takes that interactivity one step further. The same applies for any business. Using these free tools to connect and interact with your customers is just another piece of that marketing puzzle. Millions of people use social networking and they're just waiting for you to reach out to them.

If you'd like to learn more about Twitter, check out my Word On The Tweet Podcast that I produce with Fred Abaroa. Each week we gather people together who use Twitter to talk about what's new and what's interesting about it. And we have a lot of fun too. Our most recent show features Rich Brooks and Jacia Kinsman from Social Media FTW.

A big thanks to Rich, Jacia, Chrystie for inviting me to be a part of Social Media FTW.  It was a blast!