With the 2011 tax season completed, tax and accounting professionals move into the time of year of assessing the tools that they need to run their businesses until the next season. And few tools require more exploration than new media. New media? That's really what social networking is and despite the importance of mobile devices, new media are accessed by mobile devices as well as more traditional computing equipment.

New media describes what is going on with websites such as  YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn in a way that's more understandable than the phrase "social networking". After all we've adapted to a variety of changing media in our lives.

A medium is a way of communicating with people and even if we don't know exactly how these new tools work most effectively, they are simply ways of reaching others, although they enable us to deliver messages in a way that was not possible before.

By keeping the concept "media" in mind we can start thinking of how these tools can be used perform functions we have accomplished in old media, which gives us some breathing space for considering the new uses.

Sometimes, dealing with a new concept or tool, its easier to handle the change by applying as much old terminology as possible. There's no doubt that there is a lot here that's unfamiliar.

But in some ways, it's pretty familiar territory.