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By Vanessa J. Horwell
Chief visibility officer for ThinkInk in Miami.
 Once upon a time there was a vast kingdom of Communicationton, where things were neat and ordered and everyone did what they were expected to. The towns of Mediaville and Newsburg spread the word of the day's happenings to all the citizens of Comunicationton, helped along sometimes by the hardworking people of PRberry.
One day a stranger came to the kingdom. All the children in the land flocked to this stranger, who had a magical ability to connect them to each other in ways they had never imagined before. But the adults in the kingdom, including the men and women of Mediaville and Newsburg, were wary, because they'd never seen anything like the stranger before.
Slowly but surely, once it became clear the stranger wasn't just passing through, the kingdom grew to love Social Media, for that was the stranger's name. Social Media helped the townsfolk of Mediaville and Newsburg (and even PRberry) do their jobs better, and gained acceptance from even the most reluctant old men in the kingdom.
And everyone lived happily ever after. The End.
Now that's a fairly tale we can all get behind. But it's still a fairy tale.
Are social media still a stranger to most businesses?
Not really, but marketers, journalists, PR professionals and many other consumer-driven enterprises have yet to come to grips with the both the realities and the potentials represented by the social media phenomenon. In fact, many businesses, including mine, are just beginning to plumb the depths of social media.
Where do we start? What do we do? What are the rules? So I'm going out on a limb here and being a dunce at asking these questions, but really, what are the answers? And who is going to tell me?
So why not enlist a "Social Media Expert"?
With every tweet, with every friending and with every mashup it seems another expert is born. But just because you do, does not mean you are. We spend years studying, learning, picking apart communications strategies, trying to understand behavior, coaxing out our writing skills and in one fell swoop, overnight anyone and everyone who's posted or Tweeted is an expert.
Which is not to say that I am totally skeptical about social media experts. I'm certainly not one (yet), so I recognize that there are likely a few someones out there who can be a real benefit to organizations trying to navigate the social media landscape. But that list doesn't ... and can't, if we take this at all seriously ... include my neighbor's 16-year-old daughter who's six times as social media fluent as my 38-year-old copywriter at work. And judging by the so-called experts I've encountered, that's not as much of a fairy tale as you might imagine.
How can we navigate this turbulent situation?
Like any disruptive innovation, social media have come at a time when everything in our lives ... online and offline ... has changed dramatically. It's no coincidence (and no secret) that social media will become the communications be-all as we kick off a new decade: social media will be to 2010 what e-mail was to 2000.
There are many lessons to be learned and like anything new, there are bound to be mistakes. Practice, after all, makes perfect. Companies big or small are not immune to public ridicule in having "tweeted" out of line or handled a social media crisis poorly. Corporate Tweeting now comes with a 25-page "how to" manual. We're all bound to mess up along the way. The point is that most of us simply don't know until we try.
So are we jumping or just jiving ourselves?
So here's where it gets sticky, as far I see it. The jumping off point is that conscious decision we make to dive in head (or feet) first and immerse ourselves in all things social media.
It's the point where we say, "We have to embrace social media now and incorporate this into all that we do or we'll just die. It has to become part of our DNA ... this is not an add-on or a one-off or a throwaway trend. To be sure, we'll never lose sight of our respective areas of expertise ... that is after all why we rock ... but now we can expand this to include what the market wants and what the future will demand of us."
Some have already taken the leap and jumped. I have. It's called evolution and it's what will set early-adopting companies out from everyone else. Who's ready to jump now?
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