Last week we attended the Mashable UN Social Good Summit in New York. It was a veritable pantheon of who’s who in the world of change makers.

 Serena Williams vowed to be as dedicated in her new role of Goodwill Ambassador for Unicef as she is to tennis (that's ridiculously dedicated!) She promised to pump up her twitter followers and facebook fans to get involved with Unicef and their current Schools for Africa initiative.

Everyone laughed when Archbishop Desmond Tutu admitted he might be a teeny bit jealous of the Dalai Lama because he has almost 2 million Facebook fans. Even Richard Gere stopped by, though he readily admitted he knows nothing about social media, just because he wanted to see what all the buzz was about.

At the end of the week it was evident that social media is a major game changer that moves at warp speed and is capable of reaching the outer limits and beyond.

When Ashton Kutcher challenged CNN in 2009 to see who could reach a million twitter followers first, both pledged the winner would buy 10,000 mosquito nets for Malaria No More. Not only did Ashton win, but the “net” result was that 79,724 of his twitter fans and their friends and their friends also bought nets. That makes for a whole lot of very hungry mosquitoes.

Companies like American Express, Chase Community Giving, and NGO’s like Join My Village have Facebook programs that raise funds by simply turning LIKES into $$.

Since some of us (like over 700M) spend time on social media anyway .... Why not be social AND socially good?