Blog post by Colm Hannon, Managing Director, eSocialMedia

I'm stood in a jam packed South West Trains carriage at Richmond heading into Waterloo on a brisk February morning in 2012, Olympics year. The doors have just beeped open but there is no room for anyone else on the carriage. There is a very angry lady outside shouting down the carriage asking everyone to shuffle down but there is no room and the rest of the people tut and sigh at how aggressive she is. She is trying to push on and she can't and she is furious. The 6ft 7'' guy sat next to me where I am standing looks annoyed with her and less than happy about having his face so close to my backside for the next 20 minutes of our journey together, but this is London and what a fantastic melting pot it is we live in. I still have the one stop Waterloo and City tube line between Waterloo and Bank to come. I'll share a photo of that epic queue on the platform when I get there.

So London is busy at rush hour Colm – so what? Ok so here are my two points; It occurred to me that on this silent train full of people that everyone I can see and I mean EVERYONE is holding a mobile Internet device, be that a Kindle, Blackberry, iPhone, Samsung Tablet they are all connected to the Internet. All of the people that I can see. Bearing in mind SW London is fairly affluent anyway but nonetheless it's astonishing that I've taken this bizarre environment for granted. So point one is that London's knowledge workers are mobiley online.

The second thing that has occurred to me is how important connecting with these people is for businesses, but thousands of businesses haven't figured out how to connect with these professionals, so many companies say that their target clients or talent are not interacting socially online and yet the evidence is all around me that they are. And I can't help but feel that the lady who is shouting at everyone else should have just got up earlier if she didn't want to be late for work and likewise the businesses that  want to connect with these professionals shouldn't wait until the online conversational spaces are full of their competitors before trying to get on the Enterprise Social Media train. It's London, it's 2012 and you're either on the train or you're not and if you're not on board as a business don't say you didn't know it was full of professionals connected to the Internet because now you do.

If you'd like some advice on getting started using social media just ask me @ColmHannon.

For the full blog and more like it click here

www.esocialmedia.co.uk