Some of you might be think­ing, “What in the heck hap­pened to Harkavy?  Is he not the guy who said this social net­work­ing thing was a type of voyeurism?  Did he not say that Face­book was just another way to be stuck in reac­tive mode?  And now look at him — he is on Face­book, he has an iPhone, he Tweets, and now he even has a blog!  He caved!  He sold out!  He is a traitor!“

Yup, I said it all because I truly believed it all.  I was Saul per­se­cut­ing and mock­ing all you Black­berry, iPhone, Twits… I mean Twit­ter­ers.  Then came last month’s Build­ing Cham­pi­ons Expe­ri­ence.  Two things hap­pened to me while I was there that for­ever changed my view on this grow­ing social and tech­no­log­i­cal movement.

The first is that I lis­tened to my friend, pub­lisher and Build­ing Cham­pi­ons client Mike Hyatt, speak to the audi­ence on the power of social net­work­ing.  Mike’s per­sonal blog has more than 60,000 unique vis­i­tors per month and he has more than 40,000 fol­low­ers on Twit­ter.  He started blog­ging long before it was called blog­ging.  The guy knows what he’s talk­ing about.   He has been encour­ag­ing me to enter into this world for quite some time, but at The Expe­ri­ence I think his (and oth­ers’) strong encour­age­ments really struck me.

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