Remember the Yellow Pages?  When we needed business information or personal contact information, we would have to find the right book from a huge stack, then flip through all those pages to find what we were looking for.  If we needed a contact in a different state, we had to make phone calls to find a possible connection to someone we already knew.   And we probably didn’t even think about making connections with someone in another country.

Now it’s a whole different world with social media, with almost instantaneous personal connections to people all around the world.  Instead of just one-to-one connections, we get one-to-very-very-many connections as we can now tap into the extensive networks of everyone on our own social graph. 

If I need a contact in a particular company, or city, or country, all I need to do is post a question on Facebook or better yet, Twitter, asking if someone has a trusted contact in that company or location, and I will soon have a name and contact information.  If a colleague across the country needs help in their own town, a quick tweet will likely reach at least one person who can either directly provide that assistance to my colleague, or at least provide the right connection.

We also need to remember that bloggers are an important part of social media’s reach.  Just recently, I had two different situations of helping bloggers reach other bloggers in another part of the country – due to the broad social media reach I have created by putting relationships first, I was able to help them connect and get the assistance they needed within minutes by simply tweeting out a request for a contact in a very specific community. Complete strangers tied together through one trusted connection, and time and distance were immediately condensed through the use of social media.

At OpenSky, we are all about the relationships and social reach of our trusted influencers (bloggers, authors, editors, celebrities, social media mavens) and their communities (networks).  Instead of just offering products for sale, we offer connection and community to influencers who have products they believe in (from innovative suppliers) and want to share with (sell to) their network. This is the new way the world will connect, where relationships matter. 

The world is now your oyster, use social media to find the pearl(s)!