If you’ve no desire to go on Facebook, think Twitter is full of twaddle, haven’t got the slightest inclination to write a blog and ignore all invites from Linkedin, you’re probably the managing director of a successful company.

You may not have any desire to inhabit the digital world but are starting to worry that, if you ignore social media any longer, you’re likely to be put on the endangered species list.

You’ve listened to the ‘kids’ in your marketing department rabbit on about consumer-to-consumer engagement and you’re wondering if they also speak English.

But strip out the technical jargon and the marketing double-speak and you’ll probably find it’s a more familiar world than you thought.

Firstly, you’ve been doing social networking all your professional life, just offline.

As every SME knows, in the absence of a large marketing budget, the best way to get new business is to “network”. By that I mean going to events where people you know introduce you to people they know, business cards are swapped and food is eaten on sticks.

You’ve spent a lot of time making friends and influencing people in your local business community. Recommending your business partners in the hope they will return the favor or at least buy you lunch sometime. It takes years to build an effective network and you’ll probably turn into an alcoholic by the time it’s complete.

Thanks to sites like Linkedin, this can be achieved in less time, with less geographical limitations and significantly less liver damage.

Secondly, you didn’t get were you are today, without taking every opportunity to be in the press.   You know editorial is far more powerful than advertorial.  The problem is fewer people are reading newspapers these days, especially local press but choose to get their news and insight online.

The press release is replaced by the blog post, mailing list by the Twitter feed and success is measured by the number of readers rather than by column inched, is about all you need to know about online PR.

Finally, personal recommendation has always been your goal. It’s customers that get you more customers if you treat them right. Now ,thanks to social media, this word-of-mouth has turned into word-of-mouse.