Still sitting on the social media sidelines? Still doing the same old, same old... static websites, newsletters no one reads, news releases the media ignores? If you're at a small to medium-sized company, your opportunity to seize the unfair competitive advantage of social media against establishment competitors is rapidly coming to an end.

Here, for example, is Cicso plugging the gap. This is how they talk about their all-day summit today all about the new media: Web 2.0 has changed how businesses not only communicate with their customers, partners, and shareholders but also how a company communicates and collaborates with its employees. Communications is fast becoming a competitive advantage for companies to compete on a global basis.

The history of small companies that made it big consistently shows one characteristic among all the winners: they changed the rules or they adapted to new things ahead of the establishment. This is a success formula because big companies have much to gain by maintaining the status quo. But by the time the large competitors figure out something new and good is here to stay... and once they decide to adopt it big (and you know they have the dough to do it right eventually) the advantage to smaller companies diminishes tremendously. Imagine, for example, you're with a start-up company competing on some level with Cisco. Isn't it a shame your organization hasn't been out there farming the social media opportunity ahead of this summit news today. If you had a blog, for example, you could be posting your observation's, good or bad, on Cisco'd sudden discovery of new media?

Want another example? Here's a news release from just yesterday from an outfit called ELearningYellowPages. They've decided their blog isn't doing it for them. So they're launching five (5) of them.

Carrie Sommer, marketing director for the company, felt that one blog for so many different topics wasn't giving readers enough of the type of information they might be looking for. Hence, in addition to ELearning News and Views, which will remain as a source of general information on distance learning, eLearningYellowPages.com will soon be hosting four new blogs for readers to choose from.

Isn't all this a lot like that awful mental sensation you get when you realize that in about a half second, wih no time to react, your fingers are about to be slammed in the car door... you know it's coming and you know it's going to hurt and it may be way too late to do much about it.