Seventy percent of today’s 15-to-34-year-olds use social networking Web sites like MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube, according to Reston, Va.–based comScore, and other age groups are joining fast. This has online marketers tripping over themselves trying to figure out how to make their presence felt in these powerful, but potentially risky, online communities. (eMarketer projects that U.S. ad spending on social networks in 2008 will be near $900 million.) Here are some ways to get more sociable on the Web without harming your brand identity marketing strategy:

1. Cultivate fans, not influencers. New studies question the long-held notion that companies should target online influencers like bloggers to start word-of-mouth campaigns. Experts now suggest that companies reach out to their fans. Kaboodle.com, a year-and-a-half-old social shopping site, allows retailers to target users who have already posted favorable reviews about their products. These fans are invited to receive special incentives and information on new products.

2. Go mobile. To reach on-the-go teens, the Coca-Cola Co. launched the social network, the Sprite Yard, that is accessible only from a cell phone. The site allows users to chat, send messages, and share pictures from their camera phones. People join by using a code found inside a Sprite bottle cap.

3. Place help over hype. It might seem as if every large company has started its own social networking site, but Intuit built a genuine community by eschewing the marketing hype. Intuit’s sites, such as quickbooksgroup.com, are run by the company’s product development department. Users can interact with developers and product managers and receive information targeted to their interests, such as legal and marketing advice for small business owners.

4. Lure and capture. “Make sure you have a mechanism to capture email addresses on your home page,” says Susan Gilbert, owner of Joomla Jump, a maker of Web tools in Issaquah, Wash. “Give away a five-part course or a guide that keeps you in touch, turning prospects into customers.”

5. Aim for consistency. Customer satisfaction research shows that people who use one social network quickly gravitate to many others. That means companies should establish branded profiles across the networks, says Chris Winfield, president and co-founder of 10e20, a global search engine and social media firm in New York. “It’s just like the early days of the Internet, when it was essential to register all your related domain names,” he notes.

6. Go niche. “MySpace groups enable marketers to reach ertain subsets, but in many cases MySpace is simply too big to generate sizable noise,” says Andrew Foote, head of PepperDigital, the online marketing division of the New York–based PR firm Peppercom. Many marketers are experimenting with iche social networks — such as Takkle, a community for student athletes — because they can reach highly focused audiences.

7. Promote your content. To help spread the word about your social network, post a useful article on your Web site and then submit it to online news aggregators, such as Netscape and Digg.com.

8. Tell the truth. “Lonelygirl15” became an instant celebrity on YouTube with her webcam confessions. Curious, net-savvy users quickly learned that a client of the Los Angeles–based Creative Artists Agency had created the video series around the life of a fictional teenage girl. The company was subsequently taken to task. “Don’t lie about who you are, post fake comments, or remove negative posts,” says Joe Lichtenberg, vice president of business development at Eluma, a maker of brandable desktop applications in the Boston area.

9. Bring them home. “Use social networking sites to drive traffic back to your own Web site,” Gilbert recommends. A common lure: freebies and special offers. Consider offering a free ringtone, for example.

10. Create product profiles. Believe it or not, some social networking users express their love of products like Tickle Me Elmo or the iPhone by adding the product as a “friend.” Some manufacturers now give every item in their product category its own profile on popular networking sites, notes Niall Kennedy, an Internet consultant in San Francisco.

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