Little things make an impact
It can be difficult to measure the results of social media activity (here’s an article and blog discussing this point). I’ve been enjoying the journey of learning and meeting people in the social media space. One of the things that I really like to do is connect people with other people or information that could be useful for them. This can be to help answer a question or just to get people with similar interests together to talk. Some people think that updating “what’s on your mind” on Facebook or “what are you doing” on Twitter is all about “ME”, but it can be much more. Sure, not all of the discussion are creating world peace, but there can be a lot of value through brief communications. 
Here’s a recent example, a couple of weeks ago I attended a conference and while there I used Twitter to take notes and share what was going on. (Question - anyone know of a good way to take a Twitter search and change into email/Word so that it’s easy to read?) A few days later I was catching up on reading blogs and ran across this post from a coworker, Steve Todd http://stevetodd.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/03/world-innovation-forum.html. A single Tweet got him thinking about a blog post. While I’ve seen Twitter discussions turn into blogs before, it was definitely the first time that I’ve seen one of my <140 characters turn into a blog that someone else wrote. Last week I was approached to be a blogger at the World Innovation Forum in NYC next month. Steve’s post also mentioned the conference which got there attention (and it probably didn’t hurt that I’ve mentioned Clay Christensen and his books in blog post and Tweets recently). So while not all activities can be easily tied to an ROI - here’s a tangible result of participating. UPDATE: Steve Todd will also be a featured blogger at the conference.
I’m very fortunate to work in an environment with so people at the leading edge of the social media wave. One of my coworkers, Dan Schawbel, had his first book publish today - Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success - check it out - there is lots of collaboration and helping others required to build a successful “ME”.
