Every day, I feel like I cajole chefs to get busy with their social media marketing and every day the message back is: I am too busy.

Seriously, I feel that pain. Right now, my own todo list hovers around 750 things to do (I log everything into my list, from get cat litter to raise $75,000 cash for software development).  I have to continue building the 300-page wiki we are adding to SpoonFeed, update and distribute the new partnership agreements for my investors, help a young chef finish his business plan, find another young chef a job, figure out what the hell to write in this space tomorrow, and, yes, raise $75,000 cash for software development, which of course means updating my own business plan.

So, believe me, it is hard for me to also get to the social media for my company -- one look at our RIA Facebook page sorta makes it obvious how much I have been ignoring my own social media problem.  Frankly, it just seemed overwhelming to even try to figure it out.

Then I read a post by a gal I follow on Twitter and Facebook, Pamela Price.  She wrote a blog post on her patriotic gardening blog called  "Fluff Up and Promote Your FB Fan Page. And it seemed a great rundown for even the overwhelmed to be able to grasp:

• Create exclusive content and quit regurgitating what everyone else is saying.
• Allow your fans to post to your page because, it is social media, right?
• Post info from other pages to build your network. Like twitter, Facebook allows for people and pages you follow to be tagged (by typing @restaurant intelligent agency) in an update or post, which then shows up on both your feed, and the feed of whomever was tagged.
  
• Promote your page on every Internet site you belong to because, how else am I going to know about it?
  
• Ask folks to be your fans because, what do you have to lose?

So, we're going to start really drilling down on the RIA Facebook page in coming weeks.  We're hoping to make it a bit of a go-to place for some behind the scenes info from great Chicago restaurants (soon, make that restaurants from around the country!). We realize that, in our position, we can probably corral and share so many great restaurant stories that we should probably do that.

It took me about ten months to figure this out. And I think we are going to have to continue to tweak and evolve the whole strategy as we go, seeing what works and what doesn't.  But that is what social media all about.  No one is an expert, it is all still too new.  So the best thing to do is just jump in and try.

Hopefully, the work we are going to start doing over on our page will inspire you to start thinking about yours.