I just got back from a fantastic day at the 20th annual Dynamic Women in Business Conference at Harvard Business School. What an incredible event! If the students who organized it weren’t going to be busy running the world’s next generation of startups, non-profits and multinational companies, you would definitely ask them to plan your next conference.

On a day that featured inspiring and thought-provoking speakers like  Nancy Barry and Susan Smith Ellis, I was incredibly honoured to be part of a social media pane. In the course of our conversation about social media, we covered a wide range of issues, strategic consideration and tools. In this blog post, I round up a bunch of posts (mostly mine, a few from other folks) that can help you get started with social media, deepen your practice or discover new social media tools.

Essential platforms

Evernote: Once again I made an impassioned case for this indispensable note-taking tool, which will not only whip your laptop or desktop notes into shape, but keep them synced with your smartphone, your ipad and the web; it can even recognize photos of type or handwritten text, so it’s great for making that pile of business cards or notes into a searchable resource.

• Evernote 101: An overview of Evernote.
• Evernote 201: 10 ways to use Evernote in my series on social media for journalists.

Twitter: Twitter is now a must-join social network for anyone who is building a professional network or brand. Here are a couple of posts to help you make the most of this:

• Twitter 101: learn the basics, including how to choose a username, how to find people to follow a Twitter glossary. This piece originally appeared on Oprah.com.
• Twitter 201: find out how to use private Twitter lists to focus your online attention on your most crucial relationships and priorities

Delicious: This social bookmarking tool does a lot more than keep track of your favorite websites: you can use it to stay on top of the news in your field, find experts and search the unsearchable. If you’re still storing your bookmarks in Explorer or Firefox, it’s time to find out what social bookmarking can do for you:

• Delicious 101: My intro to social bookmarking.
• Delicious 201: The 10 reasons that delicious remains one of my favorite web tools are 10 ways you can use it.
• Delicious 301: The 10 best tool collections for delicious users will help you take advantage of one of the best parts of delicious: its ability to integrate with other software tools.

Facebook: The question is not whether but how to incorporate Facebook into your social media strategy.

• Facebook 101: If you use Facebook, you need to take control of your privacy settings. My how-to on configuring your Facebook privacy settings was written as part of my guide to Facebooking the kids, but it applies to anyone who wants to keep their personal and professional lives distinct.
• 13 tips for using Facebook events instead of pages, groups or apps offers another way of building a participatory project or community on Facebook.

More tools

• Foursquare: There was a lot of curiosity about FourSquare and other location-based services like it. 6 tips for getting the most out of Foursquare is a useful guide from Mashable (a great resource for learning about all sorts of social media tools).Facebook Places is a similar service; if you’re uneasy about FourSquare, you may want to read my post on how to keep your location private on Facebook.
• iGoogle: If you’re using social media, you need a way to keep track of what people are saying about you and what you might want to write or comment on. iGoogle is a great way to create a social media dashboard for tracking all your latest news and social media coverage. My list of 9 feeds for your iGoogle dashboard can help you set up your dashboard.
• Pinterest: Use Pinterest to collect pictures of web sites or clothes or furniture you love, or cool gadgets or beautiful logos or whatever you like. Organize your images into pinboards, and discover new sources of visual inspiration from other people. Here’s my overview of Pinterest.

Strategy questions

Three posts to address three strategic issues that came up in conversation:

• Return on investment: 4 steps for calculating the ROI on social media
• Getting overwhelmed: 5 solutions for coping with social media
• Keeping your online life “in perspective”: 10 reasons to stop apologizing for your online life — and embrace it as part of your real life.

More about the social media panel

The social media panel was organized by Alexandra Bochicchio, Abigail Chambers & Valerie Galinskaya, and chaired by publishing dynamo Andrea Chambers. The other panelists were:

Thanks to all these women — and to the very lively audience — for a terrific conversation.