As someone still finding his way, Malcolm Sleath from coaching consultancy 12boxes shares his own experience to date.

Question: What part do you think social media, such as Twitter, play in business development for consultants?

Answer: Getting involved with social media is a multi-faceted investment. Simply spending time at it is not the answer, any more than throwing money at a problem automatically provides a return.

My investment falls into three headings: hands on experience of social media; intelligence about competition and customers; and the opportunity to build an authoritative, yet approachable, professional presence.

Experiencing the medium
The first reason for getting involved in social media is that it is here to stay in one form or another. The point is not that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or anything else, is ‘the future’, but that the existence of these elements is changing the way in which we communicate. To draw an analogy from television, any TV drama or film we see today in the UK is using a grammar that was influenced by the way advertising agencies learned how to tell stories in thirty-second slots while commercial television was in its infancy. What we take for granted today would have been unintelligible to all but a tiny proportion of an audience in the 1950s.

One of my clients recently critiqued my communication technique by referring to herself as being part of the ‘MTV generation’. Love it or hate it, MTV and its imitators changed the way that people perceived the world. Bite sized chunks are not a substitute for a coherent argument or a story well told, but they are increasingly the way in which our attention is drawn to the information in which we are likely to be interested. My belief is that experiences such as Second Life and games will have a similar effect. Familiarity with social media will teach you how your clients are learning to filter messages. It can be a sobering experience. Here are a few examples of what is changing.

• If you give a speech at a conference, or deliver a webinar, bear in mind that the audience can now communicate with one another as well as with people not present, while you are still speaking. Sometimes the dialogue is projected where the speaker can see it. Often it is not. At least one experienced speaker has already found themselves completely thrown and humiliated by a reaction in the hall that they did not understand.

• Standing in an early morning queue at St Pancras in London on December 19th 2009, I knew that Eurostar were telling only part of the story about what was really going on in the channel tunnel. Even as I was listening to bland announcements about adverse weather conditions, I was reading tweets from people who had friends and relations who had been stuck overnight without adequate food or water. I might have been one of only a few people present accessing Twitter, but people in my immediate vicinity, and friends not present who were due to travel later in the week, were made aware of what I was reading. I certainly knew more than the Eurostar personnel who were present were telling, and was in a better position to make a decision about what to do than if I had relied on them as my sole source of information.

• I don’t have the statistics to support this personal impression, but at present, directly or indirectly, I seem to be exposed to more new information relevant to my professional field through content generated by social media users than from almost any other single source. Even if this is not objectively true, the fact that I think it might be true is important.

To take Twitter as an example, I think of it as the twenty-first century equivalent of the seventeenth century coffe