By Ryan G. Murphy, Digital Media Editor

During RTDNA’s Social Media Boot Camp Webinar on Tuesday we said that the hour-long session was just the beginning of the educational process and that we looked forward to creating a dialogue with all electronic journalists about how to best use social media.

After taking a look at the archived session, which all RTDNA members can do here, we wanted to reinforce a few of the key points made yesterday as well as introduce some other material.

Remember to be social! – Social media is named that for a reason – it’s meant to be a social forum. If your news organization is just feeding links and haphazard content into the social media abyss, it’s missing out on connecting with the local audience. Be sure to be interactive on Twitter and Facebook by replying to people’s Tweets and responding to status updates and links that your audience members are posting. Be particularly conversational when the comment or Tweet is made about your news content.

Our host for Tuesday’s webinar, Sree Sreenivasan, encourages people to Tweet about five times a day – with not all of those Tweets being just about you. Listen to other people more than you talk!

For those of you who work in a local news market, TwitterLocal is a great tool to use to keep track of local Tweets and news to connect with your audience. We encourage you to look into using it.

Use the tools available to you – Social media tools can be a huge time saver if you know which ones to use. Sree introduced several during the webinar and we encourage you to look into using them all, particularly the Advanced Twitter Search, monitter.com, real time Facebook search and LinkedIn Answers. If you need help using any of these tools, please email me at ryanm@rtdna.org

If you’ve already mastered the tools above, we encourage you to visit Sree’s “Social Media Skills” cheat sheet and his “Twitter Ideas” page. At RTDNA, we’ve spent a good amount of time familiarizing ourselves with the vast amount of content on those pages. I encourage you to bookmark both! We’ve found that there’s always something new to learn!

Social media is not just a fad – We certainly can’t predict which specific social media outlets will stand the test of time, but we can be sure that social media and microblogs are here to stay. People want to interact, want to connect and want their news now. Most people visiting RTDNA.org are already on board with this idea, but we understand that social media may be a new concept to some.. If you’re one of those people, don’t hesitate to call us with even the simplest of questions like “How do I Tweet.” Just like you, we’re adapting to a new digital world and if we can make that transition easier for you, we’re happy to help.

If you’ve yet to watch the archived webinar, we encourage you to take an hour an check it out here.

We welcome all of your social-media questions and comments at any time. Please email me at ryanm@rtdna.org if you ever want to chat.