The social media Beast seems to have become a permanent part of the mainstream, and yet we still don’t quite understand it. Television newscasts depend heavily on Tweets and e-mails from viewers in order to appear relevant. Viral marketing campaigns ranging from Blendtech’s “Will it Blend?” campaign, to Old Spice’s “Body Wash Campaign” have opened up whole new forms of advertising. There are over 600 million users on Facebook, while hundreds of millions of people regularly use Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and other platforms. Time spent on-line is beginning to rival time spent watching television or reading newspapers. Like it or not, everyone is on-line, and social media reaches them.

But what is it doing? In discussions of social media, most of the emphasis has been on entertainment and consumer products, as well as the hours spent updating Facebook profiles, playing games like Angry Birds or texting updates to friends. Very little has been said about how social media applies directly to the non-advertising needs of business. Given the current frenzied discussion, it’s no wonder that serious business people tend to view social media, at best, as a distraction. And yet, the nature of social media, with its emphasis on ongoing personal two-way communication and deepening relationships through instant communication is ideally suited to businesses that offer products and services to other businesses.

So how should business approach Social media?  The central challenge is to stop playing with it, and start using it to build business.

Of course, I don’t suggest that professional service firms, investors, manufacturers and logistics experts all start creating on-line games. Funny videos are unlikely to result in higher customer loyalty. There is little need for most business people to update their “friends” on a regular basis. Most contracts aren’t awarded to firms based on the number of followers they have on Twitter.

But the video games, cute cat videos, and “friends” are only part of what happens on-line. When you strip away the goofier aspects, social media is fundamentally about building and feeding a network and are therefore a natural analogue for how suppliers have created relationships with clients for thousands of years. Business is built on growing networks, prospecting, understanding what clients need and staying top of mind. Anyone who has ever cultivated and won client accounts should take to social media like a duck to water.

What’s holding us back at this point? I suspect that the hype is serving to obfuscate what this new form of communication actually is and is not. Despite dystopian visions of people disengaging from the real world and retreating into their smart phones and laptops, on-line activities can not and do not replace in-person interaction. They are a supplement and enabler to actual conversations, a way to extend, reinforce and build relationships. The Beast, if properly used, will encourage more personal interaction, not destroy it. The best social networkers talk to people in person as much if not more than they do on the Internet.

Consider the very term, “Social Media”. There is no preface “anti-“ before “social” it is fundamentally about socializing, and the social aspect of selling and marketing has always been at the center of business development. The need for socializing business has not gone way in world of digital social media, if anything, it has become more intense, more prevalent and more important.

It’s helpful to imagine social media as a non-stop trade conference. Just like real conferences, most of the connections made are relatively light, but frequent and numerous. Conference attendees fill their pockets with business cards of people they had a brief conversation with - but once that light connection is made, skilled business developers always follow up. They make phone calls, they set up meetings, they share intelligence, they explore meaningful opportunities – all in person, all over a period of time after their first, somewhat superficial contact. Conferences, just like social media platforms, don’t replace the need for in-depth interaction, but they do create opportunities for deeper discussions.

Social media doesn’t replace real world, in-depth interaction and it doesn’t replace the occasional conference or trade show, but it does extend the opportunity for light social touches, reminders and idea sharing. At any time, one can learn what colleagues are up to, find out who is working where, and discover fortuitous opportunities just by “being there”. Just as telephones didn’t eliminate face-to-face relationships, social media is well placed to augment our real world interaction, not supplant it.

The best way, then, to use social media is to work within a hybrid approach, where real life and internet life interact, support and enrich the network experience.

An excellent example of this hybrid approached is personified by my friend and colleague Steve Felix. He is a commercial real estate executive, investor and consultant. Just like many successful business people, throughout his career, he has used a variety of social tools to grow, strengthen and maintain his network in North America and Europe. His business regularly takes him to cities throughout the world. He attends most industry conferences and often sits down with some of the more insightful leaders in that industry. An open-minded and enthusiastic person by nature, a meal or a coffee with Steve is something to look forward to. He brings such a broad range of thoughts and opinions sourced from all over the world – along with his own passions for music, cities, ideas, innovation and people.

But as his network grew, even with his extensive travel schedule, it was impossible for him to be everywhere at once. He couldn’t possibly stay in contact with his entire network on a regular basis and therefore, the depth of those relationships was limited by the frequency of his visits. He needed to “scale” the experience of “a meeting with Steve”.

How could he continue those meetings well beyond the hour or two spent in a meeting room, conference center or coffee house? Steve started writing a weekly e-mail to his friends and colleagues. Each letter included notes, insights and ideas that he had heard from his various contacts as well as reflections on his life, his business and his family. Rather free form and breezy in style, anyone who read the weekly letter felt that they had just spent thirty minutes listening to a valued friend.

It didn’t take long for his mailing list to expand well beyond his own contact database. Professionals throughout the industry found his quick insights and notes from executives around the world particularly useful. And as they referred others to become part of the distribution list, those that never met Steve before were able to sample what it might be like to have an actual meeting with him.

Since he started this letter over a decade ago, the invention of blogs allowed him to become far more efficient with the distribution of those weekly letters, and has facilitated the growth of subscribers. Despite the new distribution platform, it is still a personal letter sent every week to his friends and colleagues. As a subscriber to his letter, I get to spend time with Steve every week, learn from his experiences and, most importantly, get constant reminders to spend face-to-face time with him whenever we are in the same city. Instead of spending most of our precious time together updating each other, our conversations start up where they left off – in his letter to me the preceding week.

Unlike many other people in my network, my relationship with Steve is constant. I hear from him every week. Instead of being a light contact that I see once a year – he is part of my inner circle of strong connections that I hear from and think about all the time. When a business opportunity arises that might involve Steve – he is therefore logically top of mind. Not just after I’ve had coffee with him once a year – but all the time.

Steve is not a power user of LinkedIn, and I doubt he has much use for Facebook, but I still consider him a social media master because he brings media, socializing and business together all to strengthen his network. He uses the Beast, and therefore the Beast serves him.

(If you would like to experience a sample of a “meeting with Steve” feel free to view his weekly letter, On the Road with Steve Felix.)