One of the main misconceptions of Social Media is, that it is more work - When I talk about it, people often respond: "Social Media may be great, but I am too busy for doing it - with all the many things I do, I have simply no time to go on Facebook, Twitter and all these sites!" - This is particularly true in Switzerland, as the Swiss culture values "being busy" and "having a lot of work" as one of its highest virtues.

This is a main misconception (or a 'lame excuse'?): With Social Media & web 2.0, you do, whatever you have been doing in the past, but you do it differently - In the beginning, it may be more work, as you have to learn new tools & rules. But many things will be much more efficient, once you know, how to use the web 2.0 for it.

With Twitter, Facebook etc your communication becomes speedier - you have more ways to target messages, and reach audiences, which would be impossible otherwise. You can much faster build your network, and quickly discover & connect to people working in a similar or supplementary area.

There is a lot of 'useless chatter' on social media too, but this is not a problem of the tool, but of the users (A fool with a tool is still a fool ...). And you will quickly discover, how you can avoid or minimize unwanted 'chatter' on web 2.0 sites. In fact, most of the tools give you much better possibilities than 'old style' communication tools like email (spam) or telephone / meetings (hard to stop).

When Mathias Rieder & me conceptualized glpIdeenPool.ch, a web 2.0 site supporting the political implementation process, many party members argued: "Who has time for this? - We are busy with our political work, and have no time to do this in addition."

The glpIdeenPool.ch is no additional work - in contrary: It has made a lot of the party work simpler. Whatever the party was doing before (or at least supposed to do), it does now partly on the web, and often much more efficient. After an important party meeting, a protocol is written - Instead of sending this to the party members by email (maybe missing out a few new members), we publish it in the member area of the glpIdeenPool. And if someone asks a question to the party, instead of emailing & calling around, we post that question online - where it is discussed by party members, as well as outsiders.

We have also a page on Facebook, as well as a twitter handle to update the people, who are less frequently on glpIdeenPool about important news.