Your club or your gang or you posse cannot get you paid, and that’s all social media networks are. They add some colour and density to lives that might be more shallow, but more often than not they make people who might be more dense become more shallow with gadzillions of strangers.

There *isn’t* any way to make money from social media time and therefore you need to severely limit it. The old academic “publish or perish” still holds true, and publishing on Twitter or Friendfeed or your blog just doesn’t count.

More and more people are discovering that there isn’t any economics to social media just like there isn’t any “economics of the telephone”. It’s something you use, if you have something to say. By itself, it doesn’t get you paid. You have to say something to someone else that will pay off.

So many people have been going around playing with these tools and interviewing themselves interviewing the tools that they forget that they are just running in circles. They aren’t using them for much yet, and may never use them. If you don’t have something that pays out already before you start, it’s hard to squeeze much more out of it just in itself. It does not pay.

The social media gurus who run medicine shows and go around to all the camp meetings squeeze more than most of us but they can’t really make a living, either.

I don’t know Intellagirl’s story, but she has hustled herself, worked very hard, gotten a book published, gotten on all the right conference panels, and probably has made this work. I don’t think she did that in a vacuum. She likely has a teaching job and/or a husband supporting her social media guru gigs — it is very hard for most people to make them do more than merely add fun-ness to their drab work lives.

Igori: That’s a very good point, “social media” is a very broad term and means lots of different things, with different tools and functions (and time investments!).. :)

e.g. twitter allows to keep up to date with many communities in a very efficient way .. no way to this in a “traditional” way.

so my point would rather be: some social media are not mainly “consuming precious time” but rather allow very efficient communication (… and communication is education :-)

I am not complaining. Honestly, it was not a lot of points. However, I did want to illustrate some reactions toward the new and novel.

Intellagirl: Definitely agree that institutional education is doing a disservice to students if they don’t teach them how to use social media, but maybe question the word “expected” in the sense that, but for IT related fields, it doesn’t seem that management/administrators even know those options exist, or what they do know, they block. But certainly as those barriers come down, I think you’re right on the money. In fact, I think it goes beyond what they’re “expected” to do and should translate into what they WANT to do. I can’t imagine NOT wanting up to date info, ready access to professionals in my field, 24/7 tech support, etc. etc.

I probably completely misread some of your slides, that’s one of the dangers of SlideShare. Seeing the talking points isn’t the same as hearing the talk. :) When I read the Promise/Tools/Bargain sequence, the polisci part of my brain jumped straight to social contracts as the context. :)