Social media has been a topic on my radar recently, mostly because I was at ASAE & The Center's Technology conference in January. And every time the conversation gets going about social media, I notice that quite a few people seem to get angry or passionate. It's almost as if people get more extreme. Twitter isn't just an interesting tool that might possess qualities that are BOTH a waste of time AND a way to connect and learn–Twitter is either completely awesome or totally evil! Twitter is either the wave of the future and you'd better jump on or you and your organization will be the laughing stock of your industry for ignoring social media, or Twitter is a stupid web application that lets your young employees waste time while pretending to work.

Now, I may be guilty of exaggeration there, but I do hear that tone frequently. Honestly, I haven't figured out what's driving it. I know I've been excited about social media simply because I have derived so much value from using it. I also know that I've turned some people off because it felt to them like I was "evangelizing" for social media. I don't know why sometimes when I'm excited about something people get curious (like my conflict resolution work) and other times they become put off (social media). It makes me think a lot about curiosity.

It was my curiosity that led to me deriving value from social media. I remember when I first started using Twitter I was fairly certain that it would be a waste of time (several out there will remember I had the same concern about blogging. Hah!). I went on Twitter and was reading the few people I knew who were using it, and it didn't make much sense. I would then click through to some of the people THEY were following, and then it made even less sense. It was a bunch of people with constant "@ replies" to things that I didn't know about. How was I going to derive any value by going to someone's Twitter stream and reading things like "@retroman You know it!"?

And boy did I feel self conscious typing in my first few tweets! Was it interesting enough? Would people want to read it? But I just tried it. Eventually, after tweeting something, I'd get a few @replies from my followers. Hmmm. Turns out that was something interesting. I then tried to say more stuff like that. Bottom line: the longer I listened to the conversation and the more I contributed, the more I get a sense of the rhythm and who was contributing what, and the more I started to learn.

I learned that I liked having a small number of friends whose tweets went directly to my phone, while the rest I would catch up with online when I had the chance. I learned that I don't have to read it all to learn things (do you have to watch EVERY television show to make television a worthwhile medium? Can't you just turn it on and look at it every now and then?). I learned that Twitter is a great way to share interesting links, particularly blog posts. I learned that more people read my blog when I tweet about a new post. I learned that as the gravity of Twitter increases, it's reach and power increase. When a few people "re-tweet" my tweet about my blog post, suddenly thousands of people might know about it, instead of a couple of hundred. I learned that when I stumble across someone who is really smart, I can take a look at who they are replying to frequently and discover other people who are really smart. Now I have new bloggers to follow and I'm learning more (my favorite example of that, by the way, is @joegerstandt. I have no idea how I found him, but I'm so glad I did).

It's interesting how "I'm curious" frequently leads to "I learned."

Did I waste some time along the way? Sure. But I never experienced learning as a 100% efficient process. I don't think it CAN be. It has to involve experimenting, testing, stretching. Of course some experiments will fail–that's part of learning. And as much as I love efficiency, learning trumps it.

It's funny. Chris Sacca spoke at the technology conference about the fact that Google places food of some sort every 150 feet in their office. They know food will attract people, and when people get together they end up learning and producing more. I love working in an office because I learn so much from interacting with people regularly. But do you realize how much time and attention I waste? I know when someone burns the popcorn. I know what other people have for lunch because I see them walking in with it. Sometimes I learn interesting things about someone's kitchen being remodeled that end up not being too relevant to me or my work. That's simply part of the mix, just as it is with social media.

As long as I stay curious, though, I will push through to the conversations that produce the important learning.