HAVE YOU HEARD about the latest dream job? A California vineyard seeks a social media maven to manage its online conversations. In exchange for witty (yet subtle) product-relevant Tweets, Facebook and LinkedIn posts and blogging activity, the maven receives a salary approaching six figures, plus complimentary room and board in a deluxe villa surrounded by grapevines and California sunshine.

You may not be in a position to hire a social media maven to manage your company’s reputation online, but with a good plan, a responsible leader and a reliable employee team, you can communicate online with your various audiences using all the relevant social media sites — without draining precious resources from other parts of your organization.

Your social media plan should consider what sort of content you’ll share — and what is off limits — as well as how to serve as a valued industry resource, track and respond to online references about your company (see Tweetdeck and Google Alerts), and techniques for driving traffic to your Web site, such as posting links to articles of interest and updating followers when a blog post awaits.

Resist the urge to employ a heavy-handed sales-only focus, or to send out boring, repetitive messages. Employees tweeting about what they ate for breakfast, for example, does nothing to enhance your online reputation and, in fact, may harm it. It’s better to find ways to engage others in innovative and relevant ways.

Barack Obama’s presidential campaign provides a compelling case study in how to do this. An estimated two billion e-mail messages were sent from the campaign to some 13 million people upon request (one out of every five Obama voters).

Through these messages, more than 3 million people became engaged in direct campaign-related activities, including blogging, hosting house parties and other get-out-the-vote activities. Those folks became the online ambassadors for the campaign, spreading links to YouTube videos and blog posts.

While a political campaign differs from a company marketing program, many of the same social media techniques can be adapted and adopted effectively by business — such as sending out frequent but relevant messages. According to Nielsen, Twitter is visited, on average, every two days by most users.