I have. And it feels as comfortable as an old piece of new media. (Well, you know what I mean.) So here’s what I call my social media network trifecta and what I think you can get out of each of these three venues. (Because I keep getting asked “what do you get out of those three venues?”)

In particular order:

Facebook: Personal Connections

MYTH: All people post is stupid stuff about baking cupcakes, I don’t care about those kinds of things.

FACT: I have never posted about baking cupcakes on facebook. (No matter that I don’t bake.)

BENEFITS: “What’s in it for you?”

• Connect with friends you can’t find time to talk with more often because life is so crazy busy

• Reconnect with old friends you didn’t realize how much you missed

• Find out what all of your friends are up to without having to get on the phone (because who of us has time to get on the phone “just to chat” when you’re over 30)?

• Share life/work happenings that are interesting, but would otherwise not warrant an immediate phone call or email to one (let alone all) of your friends. Example? “You’re leaving tomorrow for a biz trip to Okinawa.” Or “you just found out you’re pregnant with your 5th child.” These “status updates” are unequivocally interesting and each are likely to illicit some feedback from your friends, like, “watch out for the poisonous Habu snake” or “haven’t you two figured out how babies are made yet?”

• It’s fun. And I say this as a longstanding, regionally renowned, anti-social curmudgeon. It’s been great to have quick and easy chats with people that matter to me with whom I would not otherwise have been able to manage keeping up with due to the business of life. It connects you with your “inner circle” of friends AND your “outer circle,” too, in a highly efficient way: you can just listen in or join in the conversation. Either way, you remember how many lives intersect with yours and it turns out that’s pretty cool. (Though I’d prefer you didn’t mention I ever said something so blatantly uncurmudgeonly.)

LinkedIn: Professional Connections

MYTH: People just like to show off how many people they know.

FACT: Some people, maybe. Others are simply what you might call “power users.” But the truth is, in my opinion, most people really just want to bring all of their professional connections under one, easy-to-reference, access-from-anywhere roof.

BENEFITS: “What’s in it for you?”

• It’s EASY. Easy, easy, easy. This one is a no-brainer, I swear. If you can send email, you can set up your Linked In Profile lickety-split.

• It’s low-maintenance. You don’t need to be a power user. You don’t need to “update your status” daily (or at all, for that matter). You can set up your profile and chill. Your local network will build itself organically. I guarantee it. Once your network grows, you may want to revisit your profile for a good spit-polish every now and again.

• It’s like having a web-based, open-access digital rolodex. LinkedIn is a great tool for keeping up with other professionals with whom you might otherwise lose track of over the years. You may also be surprised to see the people you and your own contacts know in common in your local network.

• It’s an at-a-glance resume. Think of it as a resume that is easy to maintain and will get a lot more traffic than the one you have to type up and perfect when you’re looking for a new job or a job change. This gives you a nice, easy-access “backup” resume, one that’s always current and ready to go.

• It keeps you top of mind. As people dip in and out of their contact lists on LinkedIn, your name is going to pop up. When you add a new contact, your name pops up. If you join a group and make your involvement public, your name will pop up. As a matter of fact, if you do end up joining any of the Linked In groups, you might find yourself engaging in conversations with other professionals outside of your “firsthand” network, thus building a whole new set of connections and a more “robust” network. Me? I’ve made some nice linkups with people (I did not previously know) from my college alumni group. Probably wouldn’t have otherwise met them. So I think that’s pretty solid networking in action.

• LinkedIn Apps. If you want to go really crazy and pimp your Linked In profile, you can incorporate some of Linked In’s applications that enable you to display your blog feed, post a poll or showcase your slideshare presentations, among other things. There’s more, but that’s all I have to say about that at the moment. The apps are relatively new as of this writing and I’m still playing around with them.

Twitter: The Personal-Professional Connection Conduit

MYTH: “I have nothing to tweet about.”

FACT: Sure you do. You know something about something. Tweet that.

BENEFITS: “What’s in it for you?”

• Speed-networking. Yes, twitter is like a networking function that takes place in the backseat of a Formula 1 race car. Gazillions of conversations happening in 140 characters or less. The twitterstream flows fast, but that doesn’t mean you’ll drown.

• Options. Here’s one example of how it works: you get an email that so-and-so “username” is following you on twitter; you click the link and go to username’s twitter page; you look for a real name behind “username;” you read username’s bio (a whopping 160 characters); you thank username for the follow via DM (the “direct message” function in twitter); you decide if you would like to follow username back; you click “follow” if you’re so inclined; you’ll now see username’s tweets in your twitterstream… and usename, will thus, see yours, if you chose to followback, of course. It’s that easy to “meet” someone and that easy to “move on” if a followback doesn’t feel appropriate for you. Personally, I also always glance at the person’s list of tweets to see if username is a “broadcaster” or a “converser.” If you don’t see any @other_username tweets, (tweets directed at another username), then they’re just broadcasting which I find to be less useful, generally speaking.

• Web traffic. Twitter also provides the option of including your web site in your profile. This can work to generate traffic to your blog or corporate site that you might not otherwise attract. You can also occasionally (and not spammingly) promote your accomplishments (again, sparingly) which could drive traffic back to your blog or your business.

• Retweetability. Okay, this is pretty cool. When you see an “RT” at the front of a tweet, that’s called a “ReTweet.” This is when you read the tweet of someone you are following and think it’s so great that you want to share it with your twitter followers. So you RT it. Now imagine if you tweet something and someone else RT’s it. Think about how far your tweet could go! And this all happens with a velocity behind it you won’t find anywhere else. It’s Word of Mouth (WOM), done RT-style.

• New Tweeps. Again, I am anti-social. So don’t think it’s because I’m some kind of impassioned extrovert that I say this…but you can actually “make friends” on twitter. That’s right. AND, you can make them, as I’ve pointed out, faster than in most other venues. This is a forum like no other. A party where you make your rounds repeatedly (or “retweetedly,” you might say) in only 10-15 minutes a day (if you’re disciplined). [NOTE: To make this opportunity work at its best, I highly recommend Tweetdeck and Tweetbeep as key support services to help you enhance your twitter experience. There are many others, as well. But these two are essential, in my opinion.)

• The Twappetizer Effect. (Twitter Appetizer, I’m herein creating the term.) Because I love food, I’ll make it the center of my analogy:

Twitter is like a conversation appetizer. You may then decide to make an entree out of the conversation and move it on over to Linked In, giving your connection more substance. And for dessert, you might decide to move your connection and your conversation on over to facebook where you may see each other more often and in a definitively more relaxed light.  THIS is what makes twitter such a great connection builder. If birds of a feather, flock together, they all probably met on twitter first.

So that’s it. There you have it. That’s my perfect social media trifecta. A perfect balance of engagement venues, each perfect in its own right and even more perfect in triplicate.

Now I ask you, (“tri” as I may to get you all to quit being so shy and leave a comment already), if you had to keep it to three, what’s your social media network trifecta?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Tips to help you get started with Twitter
• Blog Outposts – Master This and Traffic Isn’t a Problem
• How to get a job in 2009
• 25 Web Resources to help you get your LinkedIn game on
• 2009: The Year of Participation

Alright people. Party’s over. Time to dig into 2009. Set the course. Adjust the steering. Power ahead.

Up until now, my posts have illustrated my obvious enthusiasm about engaging in various communication platforms which we’ll call “social media” for the time being. And doing so has made my world so much bigger, so very quickly.

Consider That Networking Now Means Getting the ‘Net Working For You

The very fact that most of my subscribers are NOT friends and family tells me (and thus, you) how much bigger a person’s world can get when you put yourself out there. This was not how I thought things would get going. Believe me, I’ve been doing virtual handstands to get my friends and family to jump on the party bus with me. I finally had to pay a few of them off, although I think they would have been willing to pay me to leave them alone…could this be a new strategy for monetizing my blog? (Hmm, may have to give that strategy some serious thought.)

You Learn Something New Every Day.

How could you not? At any given time I know that if I have a question about something, I can Tweet it to HUNDREDS of people and they will share their answers and ideas. I know that by using my RSS feed to follow the blogs of DOZENS of businesspeople, designers, artists, authors, up-and-comers, motivators and innovators, I will get the content I’m most interested in delivered right to me, automatically.

Social media is about opening the door to one-to-one conversations, but it’s also open to the masses.

If my efforts thus far have inspired you to take a new look at your LinkedIn profile, join facebook or sign up for a twitter account, then a big “Ta-Da” goes out to you, right here and now. If you’ve invested the time to understand how these platforms work, you’ll probably agree that they enable us to converge, en masse, only to organically and, rather efficiently, find other people who share common interests and can enhance your/our thinking. I mean people you really want to talk to…people who are happy to share information and expertise.

I’ve had my “Ta-Da” moment.

After much, much, much, much ado, GrayMatter Minute is designed, coded, redesigned, recoded, tweaked, recoded, tested, recoded, officially launched, live and fully functional, even in blankety-blank Internet Explorer, (hence the need for all the aforementioned recoding).

“Ta-Da!”

Now it’s time to move my conversation forward. Please join me. This is going to be fun. So…what would you like to talk about next?

Ask a question. Go ahead, I’m serious. Or am I going to have to break out that “triple dog dare” again?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Adding a Chief Conversation Officer
• Social media is not 1 size fits all
• My Top 10 Strategies on Social Networking

Friends don’t let friends use Internet Explorer.