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Everybody remembers their first time and mine was January 15, 2009.

Twitter was in full tilt over a picture tweeted about downed US Airway Flight 1549. The photo, taken by Janis Krums who was aboard a rescue ferry, showed passengers exiting the aircraft as it slowly sank into the Hudson River. Within a matter of hours, the photo received over 40,000 views and even more retweets--so many that it actually crashed TwitPic, the service where the photo is hosted.

This account of citizen journalism was awesome. Hell, it was downright groundbreaking. While mainstream media was scrambling to cover the event, Krums' tweet had already reached a global scale.

"At the time I had around 170 followers," Kruns told me. He is now up to over 9,000!

What I witnessed that day was the power of social media, as cheesy as that sounds. Blogging had been chipping away at mainstream media for quite sometime but Twitter, even in its brevity, now offered unparalleled access. We've seen this phenomenon in countries like Egypt and Libya and most recently Japan. On March 11, when telephone services were disrupted by the tsunami in Japan, the U.S. government directed travelers to Facebook and Twitter.

About a year later, I experienced this for myself. My friend Derek Markham suffered an injury due to a climbing accident. While his broken ankle would mend, the real impact was the financial toll. Derek was without health insurance and he was his family's sole wage-earner.

Maybe calling Derek a friend is the wrong word, at least by traditional standards. We had never met. However, we spoke regularly via Twitter and Facebook.

When he tweeted of his injury, I jokingly shot back about my plans to start a Save the Derek foundation. I admit, it was only in jest. So, while I'd love to take credit for what happened next, I simply cannot. Mutual friends turned my snarky tweet into an actual Save the Derek fundraiser that raised around $2,000 for Derek's medical expenses. Mutual friends, I might add, whom I'd also never met. We were simply connected via Twitter.

That is what makes social media work. It's discounted for its lack of real friendships but that call is a bit myopic. It's not the 100 Facebook friends you actually know and keep in touch with; it's the 1,000 people you don't.

Social media is powered by acquaintance!

This is especially prominent in cause-based efforts. In the past, non-profits like Greenpeace relied on more traditional efforts like phone banking or canvasing to get their message out.

Christopher Eaton, one of Greenpeace's social media guru's, explained to me that, "Instead of just hosting a demonstration ourselves in one or two big cities…We can empower 100's of folks in every state to hold rallies. To circle back, phone banking might get more people out to one rally in a specific area, but the web empowers folks to hold more rallies anywhere."

Social media hasn't replaced those efforts but merely compliments them. It offers a level of unprecedented scalability. Greenpeace can seed rallies around the world in the same manner that I raised money for Derek. It's like a giant game of telephone.

"Each tool has its place. For example, phone banking is the best way to get folks out to events and canvasing really is the best way to recruit new donors. At the same time, the web allows us to do some amazing things we couldn't before," said Eaton.

In fact, Greenpeace just set a world record for the most Facebook comments in a 24 hour period. For their Unfriend Coal campaign, they received over 80,000 commments on a single status update! PETA saw similar a success with their campaign against Bob Parson, the CEO of GoDaddy, when he released what was essentially a snuff video involving an elephant on his blog. PETA's tweets about the incident were not only featured on Twitter's homepage but the effort quickly became a trending topic.

Eaton confesses that, "When we did an action 10 years ago, folks would only find out on the evening news." And the same would have been for US Airway Flight 1549 if it had not been for Twitter.

What's missing is the result. Much of this has been chalked up to slacktivism, and to some extent that's fair. Retweeting can be as trivial as changing your avatar. I often wonder if people actually read the news they tweet out.

That said, our biggest resource of new ideas and information comes from our acquaintances, not our friends, as pointed out by Malcom Gladwell. In fact, a recent study conducted by the University of California found that very few youths were only exposed to political views they agreed with; about 5%. It also found that younger Internet users were much more engaged with real world issues.

It would be shortsighted of me to try to figure out where social media is going to take us both socially and politically. What I do know is that it's not just who you know, but who you follow.

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Jerry James Stone is an environmental and wine blogger for Discovery Channel's TreeHugger and also contributes to MAKE magazine . He is currently launching a social media startup called Trak.ly.

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