The social networking evangelists are telling everyone to jump on board the social media train, especially if you're a small business owner. It's being hailed as the greatest thing since sliced bread, and a "must-do" for business owners, but I'm in favor of a more moderate approach. I want to share my personal experience with social media, and how it has (and has not) helped me grow my business.

For this article, my comments will refer to three types of social media:

• Blogging -- A site just like WalletPop, where articles are posted and comments from readers are often encouraged. Business owners will often write their own material, gearing it toward the interests of their clients.
• Twitter -- A kind of "mini blog" in which posts are limited to 140 characters, offering business owners an opportunity to do a quick update or link to an item of interest on another site.
• Social Networking – Sites like Facebook or MySpace, in which users create full-blown profiles of themselves and link to others to share contacts and information.

I work with social media on a limited basis, because I feel it has limited usefulness to a business owner. Some social networking evangelists will likely want to burn me at the stake for saying the usefulness is limited, but it's true.

I don't have a Twiiter, I've never had a Twitter, and I never will have a Twitter. But in a sign of social networking site's soaring popularity, and possibly of the apocalpse, the USA Today's business section has done a feature story on it.

For the uninitiated. here's a quick summary of how the site works: people sit at their computers (or cell phones/PDAs) and type what they're doing at that very moment -- watching a movie, driving, working, cooking, heart surgery, etc.

The site has grown exponentially in popularity over the past year, with a current rank of 939 on Alexa. That's good enough to make it one of the biggest destroyers of office productivity in the market. Here's the thing: if you're Tweeting about what you're doing, you're not really doing that. If you say "I'm cooking", that is not strictly speaking true. At that very moment you are Twittering.

Our sister site, Download Squad, is reporting on a cool new way to get consumer complaints resolved, even if it is a roundabout method.

Twitter is a micro blogging service which lets users share 140 character updates, we have already covered how you can use it to track your fuel mileage but now it can help you resolve consumer issues. Get Satisfaction is a company which provides a venue for companies and customers to connect on a more personal level for support. The company recently rolled out a new service called Overheard which listens intently to Twitter searching for complaints about companies in hopes of connecting Twitterers with someone who can help them.

If you look through my Twitter feed you'll find my fair share of complaints about companies or services. I use it the same way you might use Facebook your blog or the water cooler at work to vent about a problem I am currently having. Now that Get Satisfaction is listening, at least I'll feel justified in posting my complaints about CBS' HD quality or the poor implementation of HDMI on my cable box!

As Download Squad is quick to point out, using Twitter may not get your cable turned on but the idea is still cool. If you have the right friends on Twitter you might be better off just asking them for assistance rather than waiting for a company representative. Or you could take the Josh Smith approach and email the company president to resolve the issue, customer support phone calls are so 2005!

What is your favorite way to complain?