At the Premier Business Leadership Series in Las Vegas, I made an effort to talk to everyone I could about social media. It's fun to consider how differently these conversations might have gone four years ago when I started my first personal blog. If I had tried to talk to business leaders about blogging, wikis and social networking at a conference like this in 2004, I would have been met with blank stares. Today, in 2008, most companies are starting to explore social media, and most business leaders are realizing the benefits of listening to and talking with customers online.

So, who did I talk to? And what did we talk about? I talked to SAS customers, SAS employees and many of the keynote presenters.

I'm going to a quick series of posts here that give a glimpse or two of each conversation, but I may try to blow one or two of these out into larger posts later if there's interest.

In the photo here, I'm talking to Thomas Davenport, co- author of Competing on Analytics. Tom blogs for Harvard at The Next Big Thing, but he tends to be more bearish on social media than the average blogger.

At a time when many bloggers are claiming social media offers great, low-cost marketing opportunities in a down economy, Tom Davenport claims the opposite. So, I asked him if he'd call himself a social media curmudgeon. His response?

"I guess I am somewhat of a curmudgeon about the corporate applications. I have no objections to people being social with each other and I have minor compunctions about them being social with each other online as opposed to face-to-face, but that’s not my real problem. I think people should even experiment with blogging for corporate use, but the hype about how they’re going to transform corporations and make them less hierarchical, I just don’t believe."

I tend to lean more towards the utopian version of social media myself, but I think it's vital to have people like Tom in the conversation balancing the enthusiasm of those of us who sometimes think social media has no bounds.

Tom is less curmudgeonly when talking about knowledge management, and he says he came to a realization earlier this year that social media, or what many call Enterprise 2.0, is a newer form knowledge management, a concept he supports.

"When I heard Andrew McAfee speak about Enterprise 2.0, I realized I could have basically done a global search and replace. Every time he said Enterprise 2.0, I could have put in Knowledge Management," says Tom.

For example? "You have to build trust between people. You have to give people some slack time to do this. You need executive support. It’s exactly the same style. So, then I decided that I had been over curmudgeonly and if we could give some juice to knowledge management, God knows it needed it, so what was I doing complaining about it? So, I haven’t done quite as much criticism."

Tom did note that his more critical posts are always the ones that see more comment activity, though, which can be good for starting conversation. That makes me wonder if I should put on my curmudgeon hat more often here, just to kick up some conversation.