I have been participating in a personal social media experiment this week to measure the networking value of LinkedIn.

I picked an interesting topic in the eMarketing Association Network: “Can you use ONE WORD to describe the biggest challenge facing today’s Marketing?”

So far, there have been more than 320 comments – mostly of the “one word” variety.  In and of itself, this is pretty scary.  Do people in our industry actually believe you can sum up the single biggest challenge we face with one word? Yikes.

Anyway, whenever possible, I commented on other people’s comments to initiate dialogue or reactions, but with limited results.  However, I did notice that a handful of the participants in this “discussion” were pushing to take the conversation to a  higher level;  this gives me hope.

Unfortunately, most seemed content to conjure up and spit out creative words, like this were an online game… Angry Birds or Bejeweled, as it were. And for me, that is the ultimate problem with LinkedIn and Twitter and Facebook as business tools. A lot of people are spending a lot of time talking about a lot of things that just are not that important.

When I was a kid and would chatter on and on with my dad, he would often tell me this:  “Words are cheap, Jimmy.  Show me.”

Or if you prefer the advice of Elvis, “A little less conversation, a little more action.”