A friend recently exclaimed:  "I don't believe in all that social networking stuff!"

Because it was a thread on an alum blog (we chat about marketing and business problems all the time ... similar to what we did in our MBA study groups when I was in grad school), I delayed my very measured response.  At a high-level, here are some Big Ideas behind electronic social networks:

Old School  - In the good-old-days, you made your business based upon your ability to maintain an up-to-date-Rolodex.  As friends, neighbors, employers, employees, co-workers, trusted advisors, and close relatives moved, changed jobs, and changed phone numbers, it was quite an impossible task to maintain an accurate record of their whereabouts and contact information, let alone their ever-changing work and business needs.

New School - Social networks have changed all that.  By maintaining your business and personal information in several key social networking locations such as Linked-In, MySpace, FaceBook, Alum Directories, business directories, and other relevant social spaces, you broadcast your location and position with a fresh perspective every day.  If you make your information public, anyone can know how to contact you and what your current responsibilities are.  Instead of tracking all of your contacts, you "link" yourself to your lifelong contacts and become only responsible for maintaining your information - at your discretion.

Using the maintenance of your personal contact information as an analogy, this same concept can be extrapolated out to the business community.  In consulting you create a social space of customers where they update their information and participate in interest groups.  They become responsible for indicating their interests, areas of specialty, and needs.  You become responsible for maintaining communications and delivering information of use and attraction to your audience.  Simple chat groups are very effective at monitoring your community as are email threads of customers who are "grouped" together.

The net result of the new social media paradigm is that the burden of tracking all the people with whom you have interacted now only falls on the individual and business.  Your new burden is to ask associates to "link" to you and to update their information.