Let's play a quick game of would you rather...Suppose you're a contestant on the TV game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? You've made it through the first 14 questions, but find yourself stumped by the last question, the one that wins you the million. With so much at stake, would you rather...use your "phone a friend" lifeline (to call that physicist buddy who aced the SAT and went to Yale on an academic scholarship) or poll the live studio audience of regular Joes by using your "ask the audience" lifeline? If you said phone your genius friend, you may want to reconsider.

In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, journalist James Surowiecki advances the idea that when put to the test, group intelligence beats individual intelligence almost every time. He proves his point by sharing results of the very scenario I pose above; while those genius friends correctly answer 65 percent of the time, that random crowd of people, the ones who had nothing better to do than sit in a TV studio all day, picked the right answer 91 percent of the time. This isn't a surprise to him. Surowiecki, in fact, argues that groups are actually better at problem solving, more innovative and ultimately smarter than even the brightest individual.

The "wisdom of crowds" phenomenon is part of the reason SAS Education has officially launched a social media communication campaign that includes a SAS® Training fan page on Facebook, a SAS Training Twitter account, a SAS Training group on LinkedIn, a SAS Education video playlist on YouTube and a soon to be released training blog site. On these channels you'll find answers to frequently asked training questions, SAS tips and tricks, how-to guides, best practice case studies, white papers and more. Through tweets, videos and blogs, SAS Education plans to facilitate conversations on popular user topics such as analytics, certification and new-to-SAS topics.

While we're excited about interacting more with our users through these channels, we think the most valuable tool for you just might be the conversations you'll have with other SAS users. So become a fan of ours on Facebook, follow us on Twitter @sastraining and start viewing our instructor tips. We're confident the knowledge you gain from these sites will make you more effective programmers, better analysts and more efficient SAS users.

And in case you're wondering just how much the collective knowledge you'll gain from thousands of peer SAS users might be worth, I'd guess around a million dollars...and that, Regis, is my final answer!

Thanks for reading,