What is the foundation of social media? A simple question with multiple ways to respond, but I found a great post this morning that discusses the 5 C’s that make up the foundation of social media marketing.

• Conversation: Go where the conversations are taking place - Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, YouTube, etc.  Establish accounts and create your identity.  Stay up-to-date with your accounts and participate often.  Really get to know your followers and audience so you can actively participate.

• Community: Seize the opportunity to not only join and participate in conversations, but add your own value.  This is how you create a community, which you must work to maintain and earn the trust of your followers. A good site for community building (in addition to the ones mentioned above) is Ning.  Ning allows its users to create their own social websites and social networks. It’s a good place to create a form or community around your product, which in return can produce useful user feedback.

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If you’re like me, you want your blog posts to reach as many people as possible. Feeds and social networks have made it easier, but this morning Chris Brogan highlighted a few easy ways to promote blog posts that reaffirmed most of what I do after each post I write. So I wanted to share to see what you’re doing to get word out that you’ve got a great post to read.

1. Bookmark your best posts on Delicious
2. Use StumbleUpon to bookmark posts as well
3. Use the status message on LinkedIN to link to your blog post
4. An interesting idea is when leaving a comment on an industry related blog, put the blog post link in the URL field instead of your normal blog URL.  However, by no means mention your post.  Simply leave an insightful comment adding to the discussion
5. Share your post on Facebook using BlogCast (could the status message here as well)
6. Make sure your posts get shared FriendFeed automatically
7. Let Zemanta insert related article links at the bottom of your story.  You can get the plug-in for Wordpress, Movable Type, Firefox and others here.
8. Tweet about your post on Twitter.

So what ideas work for you?  Or better yet, didn’t work for you?  I’d love to hear.