"The Outlook Social Connector, [part of Office 2010--due to be released soon] it's my killer one-minute demo these days. I literally just turn my laptop to show a CIO the ability to see the photos of everyone who's on the email, the ability to click on one of the photos and see my relationship to that person, as it relates to the emails we've shared, the attachments we've shared, the calendar requests we have in common. Their status updates from SharePoint from Facebook, from LinkedIn, from MySpace, from Windows Live. Their eyes sort of light up. It makes Outlook social, it turns it from being a very transactional email-oriented thing to being much more about the connections I have to the people I work with."
And, then there is this quote that perhaps describes many emergency managers and their relationship to social media. I hope that it also describes how you "get it" even if you personally won't use it.
"...I think it will take time for people to come up that (social networking) curve. But I think that's OK. I think there is definitely the ability for that to happen. I recently went to Japan, and I was meeting with a CIO of a very established manufacturing company, and he was the CIO, the top dude when it comes to technology, and he said to me, "I will never understand social networking. I will never use it. But I know we will provide it inside our company. It is the future of the way people will communicate and collaborate, I know that."
