Working with clients across a variety of industries, it's been fascinating to see how companies are responding to social media/marketing tools and trends. The differences are vast and telling:

• Multiple contacts at pharmaceutical companies have said how difficult it is to use the most basic online activities to promote their products. Corporate blogs are considered too risky, and one contact told me that it took months to secure approval from the legal department just to issue an online media kit.
• Compare this to a conversation I had with the marketing director of an innovation firm in San Francisco who wanted to know if I thought blogging was already dead. (I said no - it can't be dead if a significant portion of businesses still don't use blogs).
• Last fall I attended a social networking panel discussion for women business owners. The venue was packed and the session ran long because the participants had so many questions - ranging from the very basic "What is a blog?" to "Why do I want someone to digg my content?"
• Last week Robert Scoble, a Fast Company blogger, wrote via Twitter that he'd given a talk at Davos to 30 top non-tech executives from around the world, and most of them had never heard of Twitter.

This indicates a huge gap in how people are using social media as a business tool. Maybe part of the problem is that no one can agree on a definition of social media - at Davos last week, 10 social media experts had different answers. I don't have solutions for bridging the social media divide, but I have some suggestions for companies who find themselves on the wrong side of the gap and are trying to catch up:

• Wade in with a corporate blog. Blogging isn't dead - unless you're a 22-year-old navel-gazer with a penchant for over-sharing about your love life. If it's updated regularly, provides information your customers can use and reads like an actual human being wrote the content, then a corporate blog can be useful for connecting with others and demonstrating your expertise on a subject. It can also be a faster alternative to providing news instead of the press release (soon to be a relic of the past, I'm predicting).
• Start asking questions, and don't be embarrassed if you're not up to speed on all the latest social networking sites. While Twitter use is growing fast, the site still only has about 2.7 million users so far. A few years ago, no one outside of college or high school had even heard of Facebook.
• Don't forget to ask the most important question: "How will social media benefit my business?" It's easy to get caught up in the hype and decide that a Facebook group will lead to a plethora of new customers. Just ask P&G. With any marketing or public relations tactic, the most important step is determining how it will help you connect with your customers.