For the better part of a year, I was an instant messaging junkie. In my former life in sports, my publicity colleagues and I would chat all day on a variety of topics. We even conducted a group chat one day to discuss an upcoming tournament – a legitimate business application using instant messaging. While I was participating in social media, I didn’t actually think what I was doing was innovative or groundbreaking. We were just using technology to make our jobs easier.

Now, admittedly, most of the time we were just jerking around, wasting valuable time chatting, but we inched out some useful business objectives every now and then.