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Let me first start with a small disclaimer that if you try to look me up on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn or Twitter, you won’t find me. This is because I am generally against social for the sake of social—not unlike how I find it difficult to see value in anything for the sake of itself. What we know as social media in the form of these aforementioned platforms crept up on us like a thief in the night, took hold of society and don’t seem to be letting go anytime soon. Naturally, I like to look before I leap. I tend to want to check out the landscape before I settle down somewhere, and, in the land of social, I don’t see how it can be much different. Since its inception, social media has been a free-for-all of everyone from marketers to brand ambassadors to technology-addicted 14-year-olds. But all the while, I’ve been carefully calculating and struggling with one fundamental question: what is it good for?

Well not exactly absolutely nothing, but let me be very clear -- social media is not the collective sum of these different applications. It should be viewed simply as a new construct that we need to craft messages within and a means of which to drive conversation. Social media is the latest paradigm in communication – first it was newspapers and then the Web, and now social media is part of this natural continuum. The primary difference is that social doesn’t push the message but is rather a participant in an active dialogue. It’s not a start-and-stop campaign, and it’s not a question about whether it’s going to happen – but rather whether or not you want to participate.

In a recent IABC appearance, New York City’s The Geek Factory CEO Peter Shankman asked the audience, “Do you like your news aged?” Everything that’s written in a newspaper happened yesterday. Who wants bygone news? At its core, social provides no barriers to access. News can spread within seconds, and similar to what Shankman discussed, it’s just the latest paradigm that allows us to mess up faster and on a much grander scale. Therefore, companies are often wondering how they can effectively use these new mediums to help progress their company’s vision.

As I was drafting this article, Advertising Age’s Matt Jones published an article entitled “Why I Hate Social Media”. I felt as if he were reading my mind. In it he said, “What if we took the social media ‘revolution’ as our cue to stop creating tactical campaigns focused on amplifying our same-same-stories and start creating better stuff and better stories to tell? What if we got really bold, and focused on creating products and services so inspired that ‘social’ media does all our storytelling for us? Continued >>

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