With all the discussion on what social media is, what it’s future will be like, who will control it, I often feel we fail to see the forest for the trees.

I see it as too diverse of a phenomenon to pin down with one easy definition. Its applications go far beyond the neat capsules that can be used to pick a particular department or function that should “own” it. Social media is creating, empowering, and accompanying a paradigm shift in the way we use all media.

Are we fully there yet? Of course not. These are only the early stages, part of an evolutionary process that often comes step by step. But those steps are happening and happening and soon we’ll look back and be amazed how far we’ve traveled. Then before we know it again, we’ll be stepping again and look back again and we’ll be amazed how much we’ve come from that first time we looked back.

Yes, organizations are going to have to harness social media in ways that they can benefit from, to reach ROI. This means trying to create some sort of structure for it without “siloizing” it. Very difficult indeed.

I’ve tried to lay out what I see social media as. Not from a specific definitional standpoint, but from a several miles up point of view.

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Last night on Twitter, Greg Verdino left the following twit:

“i was trying to explain stumbleupon to my wife and said, “it’s like digg” - she had no idea what i was talking about. reality check people.”

Yep.  A couple of months ago I asked a group of 20 somethings if they had ever heard of Twitter.  All I got was blank stares.

I bet if you took a national survey of people, say, under 60, and asked them if they’ve ever heard of Twitter, Digg, Jiaku, Pownce, Mark Zuckerberg, de.licio.us, Hulu, the social graph, Gawker, BoingBoing, Jason Calacanis, technorati, bacn, or Ning, the overwhelming amount would not have heard of most or even any of the above, they would have no idea what you were talking about and you’d be greeted by blank stares. Read more…

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The image “http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0805080430.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, jumps all over the place for the entirety, almost in a “miscellaneous” way, author David Weinberger brings his point together nicely in the end. Weinberger starts his discussion off with a topic that is all around us; information and how it is sorted.

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I love to write reviews of books I have yet to read. I work too much. Anyway, if I could choose a mentor and a guru, his name would be Howard Rheingold. Howard and I have known each other since 1999 and when he goes gaga over a book, Everything is Miscellaneous, I am his echo chamber (and David Weinberger, another of my idols, is no slouch either) :

“It took me a while to get around to reading David Weinberger’s book, Everything is Miscellaneous, but when I finally did, boy howdy, did my head and the world get rearranged. He’s one of those few writers who makes simple and funny explanations of complex phenomena look easy. And he’s onto something important. It’s not just a new story and a big picture, it’s a new picture and a big story. I think he’s right that most knowledge has been structured and so many institutions has been arranged according to taxonomies and hierarchical file structures simply because we have been arranging knowledge for thousands of years, but we only got search engines recently. Search engines are not just search engines in Weinberger’s new picture, and tagging is not just tagging.”