Yesterday, Chris Brogan wrote a great piece about the effectiveness of social media to companies and provided tips on how social media can benefit the organization rather than waste its valuable time. Personally, I’m a great believer in the words of Benjamin Franklin: “Great haste makes great waste”.

This is especially true when talking about my supermarket shopping habits - without preparing a list I can wander around for hours, end up with a cart stuffed to the gills only to find out when I come back home that I forgot some unimportant items such as milk.

Discovering social media is a bit like deciding which country you want to take your next vacation in - there are plenty of countries out there, each with its own culture, landscape and different mix of people. It’s all about what is right for you and the issues you care about. Having a presence on Facebook, MySpace, Digg or any site that pops up in the news won’t necessarily increase your sales leads, donors or supporters - much like taking the Eurostar and crossing Europe at 186mph doesn’t mean you’ve actually been to Europe.

Having the right presence in the right network however will get you there. And by network I don’t mean choosing Facebook over MySpace (or vice versa). Or Digg. Or YouTube. These sites have such big communities that in each of them you can find a group of people that care about what you do and the issues you’d like to promote. But it takes time, planning and most importantly - patience. You can’t learn all the local customs in a week (although having a travel guide does help ;).

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 9:50 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.