I am an enormous fan of Seth Godin. In this two minute video here he talks about the value - or otherwise - of social networking.

It's fun to play around with social networking, but if you are running a business how much is it costing you to add new friends and keep up with old ones?

Try this exercise....

Start by giving your time a cost, an hourly rate. I talk about how to do this in "How to Bake a Business" but here's a quick snapshot. Take the annual salary that you could get as an employee and divide it by 1920 (40 hours a week for 48 weeks). So if you could earn $70,000 in employment land your hourly rate would be $36.46.

Then grab a diary for a week (or just a couple of days if a week is too long to bear) and make a note of how much time you spend on social networking. Write it down as you do it. If you leave noting it until the end of the day you will be enormously inclined to under estimate it (as when keeping a food diary as a prelude to a diet).

Now add up the hours you have spent on Social Networking.

Armed with your total social networking hours, multiply it by your hourly rate. The result is the cost to you of social networking over the diary period.

If that doesn't alarm you, calculate what it is costing you over a year.

Yes it's fun, yes it can make good business sense. But yes, social networking comes at a cost!