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Tonight, I went to a new Meetup group 'SMUG photography'. You might think: "What photography?" SMUG is short for Social Media University Global. The goal is to learn from each other.

The weeks after Ike, during the power outage. the social media got a boost because this was the only lifeline to other people. Somehow also my BlackBerry had internet access all the time.

Today's lecturer told a wonderful opposing hypothesis for the naysayers to social media which made me think about the Dutch queen's Christmas speech.

In 2009, in her annual Christmas speech, the Dutch queen advocated to have more personal contact and move away from having contact through one off the growing number of social media websites.

One day, the daughter of today's presenter ran away from home. He posted messages about this situation on websites like Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. As a result people in his social network, who ran into his daughter, told her that her father loved her and offered their cell phone to call her dad. Already one week later his daughter called home and asked: "What are you doing?"

Father and daughter are united again and he showed some flash photography pictures, because that was actually what today's meeting was about.

The message of this story is that social media is not a bad thing but it's not the final stop. Social media is a tool to eventually meet people in person, like I did tonight. It would have been much more difficult to meet all the nice people I met during the last year when there wouldn't be social media websites.