It is an interesting time for social media.  Fifteen years ago bulletin boards and  forums were the only platforms available.  Three to five years ago blogs, MySpace, YouTube and Facebook were carving out a niche.  This week Google announced Buzz which was added to the internet social landscape along with Twitter, Side Wiki, Wave, SlideShare, Vidler, Vimeo, UStream, Ning, MyBlogLog, FriendFeed, etc.

The entire web is getting more social by the second and user generated content is king.

Social media is still looked at as a fad by some, a necessary business tool with unproven value by others and a deeper way to discover great people to have great relationships with by millions.  Marketers and PR folks are racing to figure out how to use the tools, but are mostly using old school tactics and ignoring the strategy needed for long term gains.

A handful of companies are actually using social media to authentically deliver better customer service, listen to people and make their businesses and bottom lines better.  A mountain of critics who don’t use or understand social media are still ignorantly claiming that it’s stupid because it’s just people announcing when they go to the bathroom.  (Note to self  – don’t criticize what I don’t understand.  And definitely don’t do it as if I have a clue about what I’m talking about or I’ll look like an idiot.)

The revolution in communication is being ignored while the focus is on the revolutionary technology.  After the mainstream called social media stupid for five years, the pendulum swung to claiming that it’s the new great hope for advertising, marketing and PR.  Now we are now making our way to the middle.  This is where we start to realize that daily use of social media is like daily use of a cell phone or a car.  It’s just part of how we live today.

Websites have become media properties (which most have not realized yet), publishing is  now dominated by individual passionate influencers, and social media is lubricating a massive transition from top dogs having power to passionate participants creating what matters to the public.

In five years the term social media may fade away because we’ll wake up to realize that: 1.People are inherently social (well over 75% of your day is spent communicating with other people), and 2.  All media has become social (even CNN and newspapers use blogs, Twitter, etc. to connect with viewers and readers).

Calling media ‘social media’ is like calling water ‘wet water’.  The more you use it, the more you’ll live it and the more connected, tuned in and turned on you’ll be.

Photo source: Bilal Al-badry’s blog

The main conversations around social media are misguided by debating the usefulness of the tools based on people with limited knowledge misusing them.  Like all human communication, some of what people use the tools for will be nonsense and some will be valuable.

How people individually use social networking tools is the issue, but the focus is usually on whether the tools are worthwhile.  Don’t blame revolutionary tools for how dumb people misuse them.

The quality of the questions you ask and the quality of the conversations you participate in will dramatically affect the quality of your life. That said, the main questions around social media are the wrong ones.  Here are some examples:

“Why should I care about someone posting that they went to the bathroom on Twitter?”

“How can anything meaningful be written in 140 characters?”

“Who has time for that social media stuff?  I”m too busy for that.”

Our old filters of perception and lack of understanding about the bigger picture of what’s happening is misleading a lot of people.  Beyond that, I’ve found that if you aren’t educated on how social media tools and niche communities help your life, you probably won’t ‘get it’ when you experiment with it.

After not ‘getting’ Twitter for almost a year, I asked a friend who was building her business with it to show me the value because I knew I was missing something.  Just having someone tell me about Tweetdeck, hashtags, retweets, direct messages and explain how she used the tool made me ‘get it’ when I started to use it.

Most people over 25 don’t realize how personal branding, social web technology, smart phone technology and niche communities are evolving personal & business communications – which is how you build, manage and operate your personal and business lives.  We are fundamentally changing how we connect, communicate and collaborate.

The impact of this change is like the original impact of radio and TV when they were invented.  The level of usefulness of Twitter & Facebook is the wrong conversation.  That’s the micro conversation and it confuses people who aren’t educated on how these platforms can add value to them personally.

This is like trying to explain the value of personal computing to people in 1980 when they said, “but my typewriter has always worked fine.” (Can those people imagine life without a personal computer or the internet today?) Or explaining what a car could do to people in 1910 who said, “but I have a horse.”  It isn’t easy to understand for non-users until well after the technology moves from early adopters to the mainstream.

A lot of your friends probably don’t use Twitter today. They also probably didn’t use email in 1994, but they do every day now.  …and they might not in 5 or 10 years as it becomes antiquated technology. Twitter, Facebook and other social networking technology will be fused into an entire socialized internet along with many other technologies people do and don’t use yet.

The bigger conversation is the one to be having.  The one that acknowledges that tribes, niche trust communities, technologies like Google Wave and Google Sidewiki, old business systems failing, how Generation Y (which will be the dominant U.S. population as of 2010) operates & much more are the leading indicators that tell us what’s coming next.

What you now do on Facebook you’ll be doing on every website & it will all connect in ways you can’t fathom.  If no one has explained this & you don’t use the power of Twitter & Twitter search in your current relationships you can’t understand this.  In five to ten years everyone will get it because, like people under 25 today, it will be the water we all swim in.

We have definitely hit the age of participatory media.  Old mass media is very sick and broadcast methods of interruption marketing have gone from annoying to impotent, but I don’t agree with the idea that mass media will die.  It will be re-engineered like all industries must in this time of change.

According to the loud mouths in the media, the birth of TV was supposed to kill radio.  Then cable TV was supposed to kill standard TV.  Then VCR home recording was supposed to kill visits to movie theaters.  Now the internet and video games are supposed to kill TV.  It’s just more ‘look, the sky is falling’ hoo-hah.  (And any opportunity to use the word ‘hoo-hah’ is one I’ll take because it’s fun to say.)

Even newspapers will never die.  The industries of the past are crumbling and newspaper subscriptions will continue declining, but they’ll always be around in some fashion.

That said, the era of participatory media is in full force.  It was a babe when blogs and YouTube hit the scene, but  now it’s how young people get most of their news.

As generation Y is poised to dominate the population in a few years, all communication and business marketing methods are shifting to two-way or multi-channel platforms like blogs and Twitter.  Gone are the days where advertisers could win the day by shouting unwanted messages to an unsuspecting public or when you had to wait until TV told you what was happening in your world.

I’s all about community, transparency, trust agents, authenticity and tribes.  Although, for now the signal to noise ratio is still way off as old school people and companies still try to use new multi-channel platforms to broadcast obnoxious marketing messages no one wants without being genuine contributors to conversations people are looking to have.  If they aren’t helping, they’re hurting.  But they’ll learn, or they’ll die.

On another note, you probably remember the famous “Wassup” superbowl commercial in 2000.  What you may not know is that is was originally a short film done by a college student and then Budweiser hired him to remake it into a commercial with beer.

Watch the original ad below and the follow up to it in 2008 with the same actors.  Note how this user generated content (UGC) powerfully conveys information about how the world changed in eight years.  Then think about how much information you’ve learned in the last week or month from UGC videos, blog posts, Twitter tweets and other sources.  It’s a brave new world.

Click here to view the embedded video.