This is David here. I’m Ron’s brother-in-law, married to his sister, Ellyn. I’ve been here at Samuelson’s Diamonds for about six years and I handle lots of the finance and marketing related issues for the company.

We’ve been talking about how video needs to be a more active element of our marketing efforts and we sat down recently with a creative video production group to put together some concepts for Samuelson’s Diamonds. As we were wrapping up our meeting – keep an eye out for some great videos next month – we brought up the idea of collaboration.

How would we effectively share our ideas with one another? I don’t know about you, but I tend to get ideas at all kinds of weird hours and in some pretty strange places. Instead of trying to keep an email chain going indefinitely and having to search Gmail or Outlook for the one email that someone forgot to “reply all” to and is now MIA, we decided to use Facebook as our tool of choice. Although Google Wave is exactly structured for this type of cooperative work, Facebook is a much better option from the standpoint of familiarity. We all know how to update, share, join, invite, etc. Nobody has to be educated or trained. We simply set up a private group, invite the people involved and start adding thoughts, content, comments and more.

Just when you thought Facebook was exclusively a place for social networking and viral marketing, turns out it can also be used for doing actual work!