Over the weekend I attended two discussions/lectures in our college town. Each touched on the elements of communication. One presenter positioned technology tools in a perspective of time and evolution. The other position, taken by a NYT journalist was less pragmatic and surprisingly less open. The journalist suggested that blogging and other forms of social media might actually dilute a brand. The juxtaposition of these two sentiments might have been generational (Boomer vs. Gen X) but as a Baby Boomer myself, I wanted to think further on the younger sentiment.

This Gen X presenter is a serial entrepreneur and his first professional business was a pre-cursor to today’s social media sites. As he spoke to the young (college-age) audience, he quickly listed some “historic” points to where the web used to be – one of the points: “You could surf the whole web in one day because it was so small.” I was reminded that 10 years ago, some people thought the world wide web might not be for them and weren’t sure they even needed a web site to promote their organization. That thinking is obviously “old-fashioned” by today’s terms.

In another ten years, will we look back on this time with the explosion of social media networking and see the journalist as “old-fashioned?” Yes, I think we might. Whether we like the idea of Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn or MySpace, these sites are building momentum daily. Now is the time to investigate, experiment and sample. In the next few posts, I will expand on social media concepts with some tips and how-to get started suggestions. For today – the take away point: just because we are not comfortable with something, doesn’t mean it is not a good idea to use it as a tool.