If you think about social media (and that's a good idea), you should get some knowledge, because there is much more than simple "friends adding". In the serious business everything works via API's. These are programming interfaces of social media providers where you can integrate your business demand into their traffic stream. And even more: Did you ever think about a socialised intranet, with employee generated content?

From every direction, people are telling us that social media are hugely important, game-changing phenomena. There are conferences, seminars and blogs devoted to social media. The problem is one of time and 'brain-space'. Do social media bring a new dimension and a new quality to our communication, to our work, to our lives? Or do they just add to the list of hings that compete for our limited time. We need a cool, calm, informed, dispassionate guide to living and working with social media, without the relentless commercialism and excessive evangelism about them that we see every day.

Right! You've described exactly, what is going on in most of all people, while getting in touch with "Social Media".
And in fact most of them will waste more time on doing tasks, they never had to do without social networks, than gaining any advantage. So, what did we really get and where where will we go, is there any benefit? To get an true answer we have to stay professional. Most evangelists use the same little trick to attract their audience: They mix up some technical knowledge with the vision of a new social order. But the right way to a deeper understanding is to split the social facts and the networking concept. The best way to fail on any market is to mix your viewpoint as a professional, with the viewpoint of your target group. With this simple rule in mind, it gets quickly clear, that there is nothing wrong but also nothing new with the behaviour of the common user. They waste some time, like they did before by watching Television, and also, as we did on Television, we will try to get their attention, that's not new, that's business as usual.

That this market develops faster than any market did before, is not new either. Any new market in our history did that.
When we get to that point we should also keep in mind, that new, faster growing markets are also changing faster and that is the fact, that we as professionals have to deal with. Right now, we are on a change from the era of search to the era of real-time communication. This change causes several problems. The faster our digital communication accelerates, the higher is the part of noninformative content. A little experiment shows, why this is important for our business: Facebook has since December twice more traffic than Google. Now choose any historical event three years ago and try to find it, by searching at Google, you will find it quite easily. Then try to do the same on Facebook and Twitter. Even though there may be published quite a lot about that event, you will have no chance to filter it, because there has been to much new content since then. Google and Bing upgraded their crawler at the beginning of this year and provide social content results in real time since then. So you can shortly expect the same effect there.

The fa-zit for us as marketing and communication professionals is, that we have to switch our marketing to real-time too.
The last few years we just had to get our strong Pagerank on Google and then benefit from that position. In future this position will change daily and faster.

But anyway, you can also have a great fun on social networks, by staying in touch with your friends ;-)