• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, May 18, 2009

Let's just say, I so far am not a big fan of microblogging. I was iever a big fan of instant messaging, and I still haven't figured out any real value -- personally or professionalluy in tweeting. And I should tell you, at MediaPost's sprawling New York headquarters, I sit next to our very own "social medium," Kelly Samardak, the person who writes, photographs and posts our daily "Just An Online Minute" dispatches. But Kelly is much, much more.

For one thing, she is a bonafide expert on social media, and is one of the people interpublic's Brian Wieser should be stopping into see on our social media whistle stop tour today, but is not. (I'm going to post our agenda in a moment.)

So for those of you who think Kelly is just someone who likes cocktail weenies, and has a knack for taking photos of industry partygoers in their most unguarded moments, that is true. But what's also true, is that before joining MediaPost a year ago, she was the inside social media expert at IBM. And over the past year, she has worked largely behind the scenes to develop a series of new "groups" that we will be turning on soon that combine elements of social media, "community," and news in a way that should be interesting at the very least. In between all of that, I've been asking Kelly to give me a crash course in social media. Not simply what it is, but how to "do it." And perhaps more importantly, why do it. So far, Kelly has convinced me more about the "how" than the "why," but I"m going to stick with it a while longer. If for no better reason, than our entire industry -- and a good chunk of our society-at-large -- seem transfixed by social media, especially Twitter.

Personaly, I haven't figured out the value of communicating in dispatches of 134 characters or less (hence the long diatribe you are reading now), and much of what I read on my Twitter feed from friends and industry contacts seems like little more than spam to me. But Kelly says that's sort of the point, and that if I stick with it, I'll get it eventually. We shall see.