Using Social Media to Brand Yourself?

So how do you best brand yourself using Social Media?

We have been discussing all day today ways to brand yourself through the use of Social Media. I sat in a room with a number of other professionals from different educational and business backgrounds and everyone agreed on the fact that in order to make yourself, your business or your products you need to increase your digital footprint. So the discussions then moved to the how aspect of branding.
Making yourself Stand out from the crowd, using different unconventional methods to get your point across. So what do you use to do this, Twitter, Blogs, Facebook and other forms of social media?
Be an expert at something. Choose something that you are working on or have a passion for and learn as much as you can about it and then get the word out. Use all of these forms of social media to get the information out to people and increase your base of knowledge while gathering in people to help you fill in the blanks.
Concentrate on the contacts you make. In business we always have heard about networking with others to meet and interact with other professionals from similar and different fields. In the past this was done in a face to face setting. Well lets come into the 21st century and start doing the same thing but on the web. Lets use Twitter to broadcast out and gather up information about topics you are interested in. Use Blogs to give your opinion about technologies, gadgets, ideas and information that others can comment on and could redistribute out to others. Other social media outlets like Facebook where you can create fan pages dedicated to what your interests are which allow others to see what you have to say and to send you information as well.

The biggest thing that I can say I have gotten so far is that the more you brand yourself through the use of social media the wider your base of knowledge to pull from and share out information.