The beauty of social networking sites is that they extend this kind of power of networking to the secretive, the sceptical and the naturally solitary.

It means those who have always worked best by reaching out have another tool at their disposal, while those who prefer to work alone can still pick the brains of enlightened peers without the face-to-face bit and with a greater sense of anonymity, only with the added benefit of a global reach.

As Carrie Mathews of the CIO Executive Council pointed out in September, social networking has gone mainstream and is becoming a value-added feature of the corporate landscape.

Although social networking has raised security and liability concerns, she wrote, members of the CIO Executive Council are embracing it, even leveraging it, for its attendant benefits of collaboration, enterprise knowledge management and brand and mission extension.

And so, in my view, they should, security and liability concerns be dammed. At last count my 551 connections on business-oriented social networking site LinkedIn, for instance, which is mainly used for professional networking, gives me access to more than 4,557,800 professionals, many of whom I wouldn't know from Adam without a social network to guide me. There were 46,238 new people added to that network in the two days between March 25 and March 27. And I can post questions on the site about just about anything really - I was searching answers to questions about Yoga the other day - and confidently expect answers from dozens of knowledgeable, articulate people. You could be doing so too.

You can find my LinkedIn profile here: Sue Bushell linkedin and I would be delighted to accept any invitation from CIOs' readers to LinkUp. Think about it.