I’ve only dipped my toe in the Social Media waters (New Venture Lab and a related LinkedIn group) and I have actually been fairly resistant to expanding any of my own personal efforts on social media (I do not Tweet on Twitter, I do not have a Facebook page, I do not have a MySpace page, etc.).  I’ve been resistant due to time constraints and because of privacy concerns — and I guess there is an age thing too.  I just don’t spend any time reading anyone’s blog or posting messages to anyone’s page on Facebook.  It sort of mystifies me that the twenty-somethings spend more time on Facebook and MySpace than their email.  Or that they spend more time online than in-person fellowship.  At any rate, the article below showed up in my inbox today and does a good job of outlining the concerns over the time investment necessary to do social media well as a company…

I recently spoke at and attended the Conversational Marketing Summit in NYC. On day two, I heard something from Brian Wallace of Blackberry that echoed thoughts I’ve been preaching for a while. He said “I was selling in the idea that social media is free, until the community manager headcount came in.”

This underscores a fundamental truth to social media that many organizations underestimate–being social means having real live people who actively participate in your initiatives. It’s difficult to automate and a challenge to scale, but it can also help move your business forward in ways that produce leveraged outcomes such as new/better products or services.

The economics of using social media in business require the participation of people to fuel it. It is not simply enabled by technology that maintains itself. One of the biggest lessons to be taken away from a social platform such as Twitter is that the ecosystem it’s a part of if, is itself built on people who keep it humming along with not only content, but a seemingly endless stream of third party applications. This phenomenon is not entirely new–it’s been referred to as end-user innovation (innovation by consumers and end users, rather than suppliers). . . .

To see more of this helpful article by Wade Myers, click here.