Something happened tonight that made me question everything I’ve done with social media since I first joined Twitter in late 2006.

You know me – I’m a complete web whore. I sign up for every site, try every web app, use every service I can find. It’s my job, but I also love doing it. I believe in the Internet as a communication tool. I love trying the myriad new ways people are using it to connect and I believed that social media specifically had some magic new potential to bring us together.

When Google announced Buzz last year I was one of the first to jump on the bandwagon. I welcomed a competitor to Twitter that had the community features I loved in Friendfeed and Jaiku, and I thought Google had the best chance to create a second generation social network. I defended Google for its initial privacy stumbles and I began to use Buzz exclusively, replacing Twitter, Friendfeed, and Facebook. I built a following of over 17,000 people. I was happy.

Then last night I noticed that my Buzzes were no longer showing up on Twitter (I use a service called Buzz Can Tweet that has been pretty reliably rebroadcasting my Buzz posts to Twitter.) I looked more closely at my Buzz feed and noticed that there had been considerably less engagement over the past few weeks. Then I noticed that I wasn’t seeing my posts in my Buzz timeline at all. A little deeper investigation showed that nothing I had posted on Buzz had gone public since August 6. Nothing. Fifteen posts buried, including show notes from a week’s worth of TWiT podcasts.

Maybe I did something wrong to my Google settings. Maybe I flipped some obscure switch. I am completely willing to take the blame here. But I am also taking away a hugely important lesson.

No one noticed.

Not even me.

Hmmm…

Allan Mulally [Ford], Tony Hsieh [Zappos], and Howard Shultz [Starbucks] embrace social media and their companies have benefited. However, many CEOs despise social media. This can be challenging for the social media champions within companies or social media consultants trying to help companies. For the socialmediarati, we have a choice; we can call these CEO’s disparaging names, or we can better understand why they hate social media. The first may be more fun [name calling], but the later is more productive and beneficial.

In a great post from the executives at DemingHill [Why Executives Hate Social Media] we get an unfiltered viewpoint – straight from the executives – on why they feel this way. I discovered this posts because they use many facts from my Social Media ROI post & video. I encourage you all to read the DemingHill post, but it is VERY long, so below is the Cliff Notes version.

Follow the ‘via’ link to go to the source…