There has been a lot of discussion on a couple of list I am on lately about twitter and other social media tools. The common question is “why should I even bother”.

Let me first say, I understand the question. I asked myself the same thing many months ago. It wasn’t until I started to really dive into the whole social media thing, did I discover the power it did contain. Today in my twitter tool, TweetDeck one of my favorite people posted this tweet:

You really should be following @johnhaydon on twitter. I can always rely on John to provide me with thought provoking links which often lead me to write a blog post. And this is a prime example.

What John’s link did was send me to one of the best post I have read in months on what social media is all about. We are Engineering Presence. We are Presence Engineers is not a long post. In fact there is one particular sentence in this post which says it all.

Today, I spend most of my time helping clients create a ubiquitous (relatively speaking, of course) and increasingly relevant presence designed to facilitate communication and engagement with their intended audiences.

Let me highlight those words you need to burn into your mind when it comes to understanding why social media is so important.

“create…[an] increasingly relevant presence designed to facilitate communication and engagement with [your] intended audiences.”

That is it. The 1 trillion dollar statement we need to think about when we are trying to figure out if social media tools like, twitter, Facebook and/or LinkedIn are places we should be putting any of our efforts. Using those social media tools gives us the ability to define a new kind of presence. One which was not even available 12 to 24 months ago in my opinion.