Following the (Virtual) Crowds

This month's cover package, "The New Basics of Marketing," went live on Inc.com yesterday. As the title suggests it's a comprehensive guide to what's new in online marketing—covering everything from social networks to text message advertising. In putting together the package, we frequently wrestled with this question: How much technology is too much? Which technologies are worth considering, and which ones should be left to the futurists, bloggers, and your children?

It's a hard one. Trying something new—say marketing on Second Life or hiring using LinkedIn—can often lead to wonderful things. But just because a new website makes headlines doesn't mean it's time throw money or time at it. Making these decisions is even harder when one is confronted by stories like this one, published by InsideCRM, a sales and marketing trade publication. The article details "50 Social Sites That Every Business Needs a Presence on." That's fifty, as in five oh. (Disclosure: We have social network too, called IncBizNet.)

Should every CEO of every company spend the next few months building up a presence on Tubearoo, WikiHow, Furl and the 47 other must have networks on the list? Probably not. But, as we wrote in this month's issue, every company should at least understand what social networks are all about. Read our story to find out why and then check out this sidebar for a guide to advertising on a handful of the top networks.

In the story we picked a few social networks that are worth paying attention to—including MySpace, Facebook, and Ning. Which ones do you think are worth a look and which are a waste of time?

Senior contributing writer Max Chafkin has profiled companies such as Yelp, Zappos, Twitter, Threadless, and Tesla for the magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. @chafkin