The hype around social media con­tin­ues unabated — busi­ness, mar­ket­ing, gov­ern­ment, NFPs; every­one is get­ting involved. But to my mind, we’re still some­what miss­ing the point. Mak­ing it a part of our lives in a way that avoids the hype and adds real ben­e­fit to our own lives and the lives of oth­ers will be the the real tip­ping point of the accep­tance of social media in busi­ness and amongst those who are still cau­tious about its adop­tion or per­ceive no need for it in their lives.

Addi­tion­ally, there’s a large part of the world that sim­ply doesn’t share our echo cham­ber. In the devel­op­ing world con­nect­ed­ness is crit­i­cal, as we con­tinue to see in the man­age­ment of dis­as­ters around the world (as in this great pre­sen­ta­tion from Bar­Camp Can­berra 2010 by Shoaib Burq show­ing the mas­sive increase in data avail­able about Port au Prince since the earth­quake) and in the con­tin­u­ing emer­gence of mobile data dri­ven inno­va­tion in SE Asia and Africa. But for these folks, iPhones, Nexus Ones and iPads are still part of a dis­tant future. Even a decent desk­top PC may not be a real­ity. Rather, a grey-​​screen Nokia phone may be their tool for con­nect­ed­ness. We must engage with them on their terms.

So, here are my three big ideas for social media in 2010, dis­tilled into some quick thoughts

We are still a long way from social media use in busi­ness as a given. Large num­bers of busi­nesses alto­gether and many more peo­ple within busi­nesses of all sorts do not under­stand social media and per­ceive no value for it in their lives, the lives of their staff or their work. Edu­ca­tion, valid, real case stud­ies rather than the­ory, gov­er­nance, men­tor­ing, sup­port from lead­er­ship are all crit­i­cal fac­tors in its suc­cess and as prac­ti­tion­ers and con­sul­tants, we must enable that by speak­ing the lan­guage of busi­ness.

The devel­op­ing world is yet to dis­cover social media in the way the devel­oped world has. And they may not want to. We must engage with the devel­op­ing world to enable con­nec­tions to hap­pen and cre­ate great social inno­va­tion where infra­struc­ture and tools may not be a rich as we have.

There will always be peo­ple for whom social media is not a pri­or­ity. We must find ways to engage with them on their terms and inte­grate it with the things we are doing.

So, in the spirit of my last post, what do we DO from here to progress these ideas and the actions that can make a dif­fer­ence from them?