Recently, I was watching a man stand in line for lunch at a cafeteria. He stared at the platter of unfamiliar food before him, looked up at me warily and said “I’m going to stick to what I know,” before reaching for a turkey sandwich and a mayonnaise packet. He was immediately comforted, having reassured himself it was okay not to take chances.

Lucky for him, he can survive on turkey sandwiches. But companies looking to keep up with competition in this day and age (let alone be a leader) can’t do so unless they adapt and try new things – even if it gives them nightmares and/or a drinking habit.

So how do companies take steps forward? By taking comfort in examples of how these tactics are being used in the real world. Take Twitter for example. “How would we ever use this for a B2B approach for customers?” a communications professional might ask. “They know less about Twitter than we do – which is to say, nothing.”

“Ah,” you might say, leaning back with a wry smile. “You need not necessarily try to reach your customers directly with Twitter. But, rather reach the early-adopter bloggers and mainstream media who use this technology to get information for stories that your customers would read.”

When trying to explain to someone how this stuff works you just need to show them, if only sometimes to prove to yourself that your ideas are not just hot air.

Something brought this into focus for me this weekend – and that something was the prospect of life on Mars, no less. See, there were all sorts of rumors that the Phoenix Rover had found something big – so big that the White House had been briefed, like in one of those movies where they try to use a lot of special effects to make the acting seem better.

But don’t queue up David Bowie just yet. NASA reached journalists immediately to put the brakes on this story – via, no kidding, Twitter.

According to Wired:

The subtleties, however, were quickly lost in the blogosphere, where excitement began to build that simple extraterrestrial life, or something suggesting its presence, had been found on Mars.

Late last night, @MarsPhoenix (aka Veronica McGregor, a NASA employee) responded to the story, via the mission’s Twitter account.

“Heard about the recent news reports implying I may have found Martian life. Those reports are incorrect,” she tweeted. “Reports claiming there was a White House briefing are also untrue and incorrect.”

Now that’s pretty amazing, don’t you think? Journalists got an immediate update about potentially the biggest story of our lives from NASA(!) via Twitter.

Now we’ll just wait and see if NASA was telling the truth or not, because that’s also important…