If you remember what Web 2.0 meant, you weren't there.

Is social networking a valuable communication tool or a pointless fad that encourages the marketing team to waste hours every day playing with the Internet? Take the doubt out of the equation and ensure that your online presence is as ineffective as possible with these 10 easy steps:

1) Given the option to upload a whole gallery with regular updates from your mobile phone, just post a single formal publicity photo so there’s really nothing see.

2) Post 30 second samples instead of full songs, because if there’s really nothing to hear either, people will have to buy something. Acquire one customer at the expense of many sales by only linking to your store, not to retailers that people actually use.

3) Copy the artist’s full bio from their website. People will totally want to read that.

4) Undermine any remaining illusion of informality or intimacy by writing status updates in the third person. Run everything by the branding committee, because something bad will happen if you miss the desired tone of “carefully scripted corporate communication”

5) Stay on point. People don’t want to read personal updates from musicians alongside personal updates from their friends. They want to hear about tour dates and merchandise.

6) Whatever you do, don’t respond to people that make asinine comments. That’s not what the Internet is for, and it will only encourage them.

7) Never ask people to help spread the word. It will undermine the sense of aloof separation that you’ve worked so hard to create, and people will make even more stupid comments.

8) Post exactly the same thing to Facebook and Twitter because they’re basically the same thing, but don’t use either to link to low-budget videos on YouTube. That looks amateur, and anyway YouTube commenters are the worst.

9) Don’t compete with yourself: make sure that there’s nothing on any of these pages that isn’t available on your website. Show how inclusive you really are by starting your own social network, allowing all the right sort of people to join once they’ve provided basic personal information, a verified email address, two security questions and a password consisting of at least eight different characters, two of which must be non-consecutive numbers.

10) Better still, create an iPhone app that poorly replicates the free functionality of your hideous Flash-based website. Price it at $4.99.