I’m sure you’ve all been in a similar discussion. Last night I was playing poker with my neighbors and someone brought up how frustrated they were with their wife always on Facebook. Another chimed in, “she’s on Facebook while I’m on porn. I’m good with that!” Which you can imagine lead to a series of discussions that took us in many directions:).

With my ”social media advocate” hat on I quickly turned to the Internet on my BlackBerry to see what I could find in the debate – Social Media vs. Porn. To my surprise I came across a number of posts from this June that proved my poker buddies wrong…Social Media has become a more popular online activity than porn! Steven Stark talks about it in his blog post, “Social Media Beats Porn” which references the SearchEngineWatch.com article by Erik Qualman entitled, “15 Social Media Maxims for Marketers” from June 1 citing recent Hitwise data. Although I question the interpretation of the study…I still think it’s a pretty cool stat to throw out as we’re educating folks about social media.

So I suppose we as Americans have now added to our vices? Sex, gambling and Social Media?! I suppose it could be worse:).

As I was participating in #journchat LIVE last night here in Chicago (which was a great event…thanks Sarah Evans!), I realized that many of the topics we were discussing, although important to our chat topic, were really the types of conversations we need to be having with non-marketing folks.

In fact, I just wrote about this subject last week in my post Social Media Advocacy: Stepping Out of Our Silo.

Then I wake up this morning with several voicemails from local media asking me to talk with their business listeners/readers about this very subject. It turns out one of the local papers the Northwest Herald did a piece in today’s paper, “PR firm a Pipeline to social media for firms” . Although I’m very humbled (goofy picture aside…below) to receive this coverage, my vision is that CEOs and general business professionals will realize the value (or not) of social media instead of passing it off to the marketing/communications team.

Sometimes I realize if it’s the “social media” term that throws them off? Perhaps we need to start advocating around “the new word of mouth” – maybe this is a term that is more C-level friendly?

As a marketer and PR professional I am targeted (weekly if not daily) with a new seminar, conference or webinar on various ways I can leverage social media and the various platforms for my profession. A recent example includes a “Twitter Boot Camp for PR & Internal Communications Workshop” hosted by Ragan Communications (a very trusted source in our industry) which is actually being led by two folks I really admire – Allan Schoenberg (CME Group) and Barbara Rozgonyi. In fact, I recently led the conversation for a “Twitter 101″ webinar for PR professionals with CISION, the leading media relations software provider. Over the course of two sessions we had more than 2,000 participants!

I think its great our profession and industry are embracing social media advocacy and I can honestly say that I’ve never been on a call, webinar or attended a conference on this subject that didn’t provide at least some value. Most advice has been pretty solid for myself and I can only assume for the other marketers involved with each…but what about everyone else in business??

I’m a firm believer that as marketers and PR professionals we often operate in our comfortable “silos” (or departments). Some common examples of this are when your company receives media coverage and the marketing team might put a link to such coverage up on the website and perhaps have professional reprints made of the story for the sales team. Instead, shouldn’t the coverage be leveraged and packaged for all of your departments to effectively communicate with each of your targeted audiences? Probably…but we don’t.

I bring this up because I believe we’re missing the boat as social media advocates for business (as a whole). Instead we continue to educate within our own comfort zone, to our own people, and in ways that matter to our profession.

- What about the CEO who thinks social media is a waste of time…as he observes his teenage kids constantly communicating on Facebook?

- What about the Sales VP who doesn’t believe Twitter can generate any sales for her company?

- What about the SVP of HR and Legal Counsel who are trying to figure out how restrict their employees’ social media participation while at work?

I think you see my point. What can or should we do? I’m all ears:).

Jumping on Twitter this morning I was bombarded by numerous updates about the continued love fest for Twitter (for which I’m certainly a part of) including – Adam Lavrusik of Mashable’s, “5 Reasons Why Twitter’s Growth Cannot Be Stopped”  and Erick Schonfeld of Tech Crunch’s, “Twitter Reaches 44.5 Million People Worldwide in June.”

All this love for Twitter and social media in general reminded me to make a point that I had been meaning to blog about for some time -

“Social Media (including Twitter) and the relationships we develop, massage and foster online are only as good as those we can convert offline.”

What I’m ultimately getting at is that we can get all hung up on the love around Twitter and social media – including these very impressive stats – but unless (as business professionals) we can take these relationships offline (where business really happens) this is all worthless.

I know this is a pretty broad blanket statement, but in general I think we need to realize that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, blogging, etc. are additional communications vehicles to help us more effectively do whatever it is that we do in our careers.

I’m stoked that Twitter had more than 44.5 million unique visitors in June. It’s shocking and reassuring to see all of the stats around this space we all love (here is a great presentation on that). But none of this really matters if businesses don’t understand how to leverage their social media strategy and initiatives to help accomplish their business goals (shocking…I know). Yet the overwhelming majority of businesses I’ve talked with on this subject don’t have a formal strategy in place.

I’ll get off my soapbox as I’d love to hear more from you about your feelings about where social media is heading for business. Of course, I’ll continue to advocate:).