The political theater that is the presidential election season has us well accustomed to the daily barrage of polls and surveys each campaign is trumping. But it is a very different type of survey playing a key role in a massive Government IT contract awarded last year.

This past July, 29 firms were selected from a pool of 66 as eligible contractors for the $50 billion Alliant contract covering a broad range of government IT projects. Winners issued press releases, prepared for Agencies to begin using the contract, and no doubt rejoiced after spending hours, days, weeks preparing their bids.

A month later three unsuccessful bidders protested the General Services Administration (GSA) contract to the GAO. In September that list grew to eight. The winning bidders - names like AT&T, Alion Science and Technology, SAIC, Unisys, EDS, CACI Federal - dug in, waited for the outcome and hoped that the issues could be resolved.

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Unless you are the Lone Ranger, Rambo or Superman, you have to work with others to get the hard things done. And the harder the thing is you need to accomplish, the more important collaboration becomes. Fortunately for today’s executive, there are some great new Web2.0 tools that can help you connect with others.

Popular social networking tools include LinkedIn, Plaxo, Spock, SecondLife and Facebook. The following are some personal thoughts/perspectives based on how I use those tools:

LinkedIn.com is good for keeping up with the careers of friends and associates. It has also been of use in helping me introduce myself to others since I can connect to a new associate via LinkedIn and they can see my extended profile. Conversely it helps me learn a bit more about who I might be meeting with so I frequently check LinkedIn before I meet with someone new. If an executive was only going to pick one online social networking site to use I would recommend this one.

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