Feed the e-mail beast. We all do it, from the time we log on in the morning till late in the day when a last thought needs to be shared with a colleague or friend. We're sending messaging morsels over mobile devices to try to satiate its insatiable appetite. Don't feed the beast--take off a week, a day, even an hour--and you fall dangerously behind.

Imagine a friend describing a great party she is planning--wonderful food, music, people, dancing--all on a beautiful exotic beach. Too bad it's in New Zealand and you're in New York. Your loss.

All Twitter benefits and (potential) spheres of usage are yet to be explored. However it is great to see some of huge companies already taking advantage of the tool:

Social networks aren’t just a fad. in fact, they’ll become more crucial for doing business in the future. “Eventually, every company will have to work with the winning social network firm or firms, just as almost all companies work with Yahoo and Google,” John Sviokla, vice chairman of Diamond Management & Technology Consultants, wrote in a late September blog post.

Sviokla sees social networks playing a huge enterprise role in two specific areas: finding talent and burnishing corporate images. Meanwhile, the promise of social networks holds big potential for executives to boost their own reputation.

A one-year follow up on a study of social media adoption at 500 of the fastest growing companies in the U.S. has found that familiarity with and use of blogs, podcasting, wikis, online video, and social networking has skyrocketed in 2008 to nearly double what it was in 2007. 77% of respondents now report at least some use of a social media tool in their business.

Video blogging, or vlogging, as it has come to be known, can be an extremely daunting project for the inexperienced. However, with a bit of practice and a few pointers, you can be vlogging like a pro.

Although experts in the social media space have been talking about how businesses might adopt microblogging tools like Twitter and Plurk, only recently have we started to see a series of new vendors cropping up in the enterprise microblogging space. This has been due in part to businesses needing to figure out how Twitter can benefit the enterprise.

The fact that the mainstream press has started covering this topic has also helped to push things along (see Businessweek’s CEO Guide to Microblogging if you need proof).

Despite the fact that 39% of the Inc. 500 are blogging, I found only a tiny handful of folks at the Inc. 5000 conference (speakers or entrepreneur-attendees) who are actively engaged in using social media. And when I say "actively," I mean more than the occasional blog post.

According to the 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study, 93% of Americans believe that a company should have a presence on social media sites, and 85 percent believe that these companies should use these services to interact with consumers.

Cone, a Boston-based consulting firm, also found that men are far more likely to interact with a company through social media than women are. 56% of consumers believe that a company is providing them with a better service by interacting with them on social media sites.