This week, the Masters are taking place and you would need to live in a cave not to hear about it or Tiger Woods …and that got me thinking.  Anyone can play golf, albeit at different levels, but ANY one can play.  It’s the same thing with Social Media, anyone can do it but not everyone can perform at the same level or achieve the same results.  Having spoken to many CEO’s over the last few months, it is very clear that a lot of confusion exists in the business world, regarding what Social Media can achieve and WHO can actually achieve those results. “Awareness of social media” (i.e. we’ve heard the names of the sites or we may tentatively use a particular site) is not the same thing as “a business understanding of social media”. Think of it this way, Social Media metaphorically is like golf, anyone can do it, but if you are teeing off on the 72nd hole of the Masters, do you want your cousin’s college age kid or Tiger Woods playing this most important hole for you?

 Earlier this week, a friend was mentioning a discussion he had with a common acquaintance of ours.  This acquaintance, said, “he gave up on LinkedIn & social networking as he simply didn’t see any benefit for himself to continue to pursue it”.   This seems to be a common frustration, yet with LinkedIn now over 30,000,000 registered users and growing at more than 1.2 million users per month and having raised a roughly $100 million in venture funding, clearly they are doing “something right” for social networkers.  Let’s try to examine this dichotomy further.

 I’ve co-hosted a number of phone calls over the last couple of weeks on the topic of business growth and social media.  During these calls we’ve received numerous questions that seem to pop up, again and again. Thus I thought it might be beneficial to share a couple of them.  For the purposes of this post, let’s address these questions with summary level responses and then over the near term, build each of the questions out into its own blog post.
There are hundreds of Social Media type sites, what is a good way to determine which are useful and which might be needless duplication?

 Communication and business effectiveness in our new world of Social Media is measured by a level of “being connected”.  Taken at face value Twitter is not unique, it is simply another method of communication. However, when you take a deeper look at Twitter, it is revolutionary.  It is an extremely powerful business communication tool that enables you to publish your thoughts on the fly to the world, or plug into the thoughts and information streams of other relevant parties and prospects.  Imagine having a loudspeaker plugged into all of your “connections”.  This would open up a whole new level of contact with your customers, your business partners and your employees. So, what is Twitter?