Mobile changes social from a "check-when-I'm-at-a-PC" experience to one that pervades everyday life. Mobile penetration in the US will reach one in three consumers this year. The explosion of cheap smartphones in 2012 is what will make social part of the fabric of every interaction.

Social 2012 is Web 2000, says Josh Bernoff on Adage Digital Next. Spot on. Similarities are obvious. So obvious, in fact, that it’s worth it to single out some of the key issues. We are again likely to overestimate the short-term impact and underestimate the long-term impact.

First up, there are enthusiastic evangelists. The engaging personalities sharing their visions of transparent, real-time economies, seamless collaboration, the end of hierarchy, you name it. Exactly the kind of people we saw on stages in the late nineties too, perhaps with different style glasses though. Their job is to sell the story before the product, build excitement, and attract first-movers. Thinking back, the key points in the late nineties were not too different from the ideas most talked about in the last few years.

Secondly, valuations rise beyond regular math. As new concepts take shape, early-stage business angels and venture capitalists bet on ideas, technologies and services, drive valuations up, attract later-stage investors, and drive valuations higher up. Winning teams score big in IPOs and acquisitions, those less fortunate write down losses and rethink their businesses. Making headlines of this cycle turning yet another round is pretty much like pondering why there’s a November every year.

Thirdly, there is the critically important role of enabling technologies, networks and devices, as discussed by Josh Bernoff in his brilliant blog post on Adage. In 1999, I was involved in launching an ambitious e-commerce business with a site so advanced that few customers were able to access it. In 2001, I helped grow a mobile company selling b-to-c WAP services so slow and cumbersome it took true dedication to use them. Between 2009 and now, well, we are on the verge, again.

Finally, the services that add real value to their users will eventually gain ground - once the enabling technology is mature enough to attract a critical mass of users. When that happens, evangelists and early-stage investors are already talking about something else.

Few would disagree that the internet revolution and the emergence of web based systems completely changed the way we work, live and socialize. Pretty much the way the early evangelists predicted, only later.

The social revolution and mobile systems will again transform the way we live and our organizations operate, probably pretty much the way the evangelists predicted, only later. With less of a delay, I'd argue.

To reap the benefits, look beyond the surface and focus on the changes in culture and behavior. When is your now?

The proliferation of Facebook and mobile technology applications has spawned an entirely new industry – dubbed the “App Economy” — that has added at least 182,000 new jobs and contributed more than $12.19 billion in wages and benefits to the U.S. economy this year, according to new research from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.

Two years back, Business Week published an article "Inside the App Economy", digging into the exploding popularity of small software programs people kept downloading on their mobile phones and using on social networks such as Facebook.

In the early days of Mafia Wars and Farmville, many dismissed the phenomenon. Today, they can't.

The white paper "Facebook App Economy" just published by Smith School's Center for Digital Innovation, Technology, and Strategy at the University of Maryland, gives numbers. According to their research, the App Economy has created more than 53,000 new jobs in software companies developing Facebook applications - in the United States alone.

In addition to spawning the growth of app developers, their success spreads out to companies supplying them with different kinds of services from financial, legal and public relations advisory to outsourced design and coding. With the effect of these included, the number of jobs created climbs up to between 182,000 and 235,000. Again, in the US alone.

In a global scale, there are no research results available as of yet. However, the crystal clear conclusion is that the Facebook platform and the App Economy are increasingly important drivers of economic growth. We're seeing similar buzz in the Aaltoes startup community in Helsinki, Finland: the App Economy is a key enabler for today's new businesses.

Mark Zuckerberg has done all of us a huge favor, far beyond that of being able to post status updates to our friends. Open platforms for global reach are what today's innovations need to spread.

If the number of fans or followers you have doesn’t tell us whether you’ve succeeded as a company, then what does it tell you? And if your CEO shouldn’t be worried about the number of wall posts you’ve generated, then who should be paying attention to this number?

Social media is measurement heaven. Anything you do – or anything anyone does really – is logged, tracked, and turned into shining graphs and impressive spreadsheets. Without intelligent analysis, the crunched numbers are of little value. Or worse: if read the wrong way, the numbers may be severely misleading.

The measurement and analysis model included in the new report Social Media Marketing Metrics That Matter by Nate Elliott, Principal Analyst at Forrester, promises to include the sought-after intelligence:

Original photo and blog post: Which social media marketing metrics really matter (and to whom)?

Looking beyond the plain numbers in a one-size-fits-all format, the model clearly distinguishes the differences in perspective of community managers, marketers and executives, resulting in different metrics, tools and timeframes. 

In my view, there’s two key points worth highlighting:

1. The number of fans, friends and followers should not be the main focus or concern of neither marketers nor executives. Instead, they should be looking for ways to measure impact on branding, trial and sales.

2. There are goals and metrics to use in the first steps, and different goals and metrics to utilize further down the road. Without a strong enough effort to build community, there's little sense in measuring success based on sales leads or revenues. Quoting Scott Stratten, “every time you ask what the ROI of Twitter is, a kitten dies. And a unicorn.”

The way I’m reading this, the model emphasizes the need to define the sought after victories in stages. In order to get a social media engagement initiative right in an organization, it’s imperative to not only set an inspiring faraway vision, but to place loads of small milestones to be reached on the way.

A key part of the beauty of social media is that no-one’s too small to be noted or too big to be approached. The big brands and influential people that used to pay little or no attention to Jane and Joe Average are suddenly reading and responding to their questions and comments – in the most public and viral way available today.

Why? Because a publicly shared opinion on a brand is a small victory to the brand. Because a publicly shared response by the brand is a small victory to both the brand and the one voicing the opinion. Every one of these small steps is a statement of the brand’s effort to listen and engage, contributing to all the three stages of the model above.

Go ahead and think big, just don’t forget that thinking small may be the fastest route to get there.

“What seems particularly notable about the current moment is that many people are evolving their approach to expressing themselves online, and they now have many tools and contexts to do so. And it’s up to them if these multiple identities will be unified anywhere except in their heads.”

The social web's big new theme for 2011 is multiple identities, writes Liz Gannes, senior editor at NetworkEffect, and lines up excellent points for everyone to consider.

The bottom line is: with the growing number of social apps in use, it’s increasingly challenging to figure out where to share different sorts of content, and which services and accounts to link together.

In the recently published Finnish-language book Suhde, Christina Forsgård and I bring in our two cents by arguing that there are two key decisions that need to be made.

1. Choose the primary role for each profile: Personal, professional or business?

Understanding your goals and sticking with them is a crucial enabler to successfully mixing and matching different networks and accounts.

In our view, there are three key objectives to choose from:
- To interact with one’s close personal friends,
- To earn respect as an insightful professional in one’s field, or
- To promote one’s employer’s business.

A simple solution is to select the primary role by service. As for myself, I first aligned my Facebook account as private, my Twitter account as professional and my Linkedin account as business.

2. Draw lines to what is public and what is private in each role.

It’s easy to think of examples of content that would seem odd when shared with close friends. Similarly, it’s pretty intuitive to figure out how not to impress your professional and business contacts.

Considering the easiness of finding examples, the frequency of mishaps is puzzling. Yet another piece of news of an employee being fired over a Facebook update was published just yesterday – this time at Volvo in Sweden.

The key learning is that if you share something online, it is no longer private. It’s just one click by someone, somewhere – intentional or not – and boom, it’s all public.

Multiple profiles or a more complete you?

In the social web, things travel and services change. However great a plan, it’s likely to be outdated very soon.

I too quickly noticed that my initially selected roles for each service began to blur. As an entrepreneur working with social media, I found myself interacting with many of the same people and discussing about similar issues across every platform I used, and every new one I dug in.

As Liz Gannes wrote on All Things D, it is increasingly popular to create multiple profiles for different purposes and set up new profiles that are more focused for a specific purpose. The approach certainly brings a range of new opportunities. However, it also adds complicacy and increases risks of human errors.

In the book Suhde, we bring out the other side of the coin by arguing that partial convergence of different roles is highly positive: allowing business contacts to see a glimpse of your personal side adds to your appeal, while showing some of your professional interests and business doings may be very interesting to your closest friends. To be a more complete you.

“In the past, organizations supported collaboration through email and highly structured applications only. Today, social paradigms are converging with email, instant messaging and presence, creating new collaboration styles”, said Monica Basso, Gartner’s research vice president, at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2010.

The big question here is how many organizations explore and utilize the new opportunities, and how many stick with playing defense?

As noted by Monica Basso, technology is an enabler, culture is a must. Similarly to other business applications, communication solutions only work if they are integrated in business processes. By far the best way to fail is to bring on another disparate application and expect employees to go out of their way to use it.

Social-enabled technologies carry a great promise for organizations. They turn information into commodity that is no longer scarce and siloed, but available to all, organized and personalized in ways that best suit everyone's individual needs and preferences. Power and influence result from sharing and not from withholding information.

When everyone in an organization has access to the bigger picture and the ability to flexibly organize the information flows in their personal social hub in ways that support their efficiency and productivity, the result is a leap towards meaningful work.

No longer are employees locked in their offices or cubicles doing their tiny part in a larger mission they struggle to remember; instead, everyone is able to see their role and effect in real-time, and gain motivation from smooth contacts with the people they interact with in the process.

All this by replacing email with social-enabled technologies? No. All this by re-thinking how work is organized, and by proactively utilizing the newly available tools to smooth out processes that stand in the way.

"Social is how we are increasingly learning about brands: 25 % of search results for the world's top 20 largest brands are now links to user generated content", writes Chris Perry on AdAge's Digital Next.

Worrying about losing control of brand identity because of random conversations in social media is common these days, and rightly so. Individual opinions and comments may reach surprisingly large audiences and suddenly appear on top of search results, despite all the efforts put into search engine optimization.

However, as Chris Perry points out, there's more to worry about, and closer. The race to be involved in every social platform and to create more and more campaigns and content to demonstrate engagement brings an increasing risk of inconsistency. The excitement easily leads to too much stuff, too many bells and whistles, posted on too many platforms. The larger the organization, the greater the risk.

It's not that campaigns are bad, or that presence in several platforms is harmful. The point is that the pieces need to fit together. It's important to plan using a framework - or a social architecture as labeled by Chris Perry - that ensures every activity plays a role in maintaining and building a consistent brand. What doesn't fit shouldn't be done.

There's certainly no shortage of social media consultants these days. A crowd of self-appointed gurus on the left, old-school consultants with a modern twist and new glasses in the middle, inexperienced hipsters with trendy titles on the right. And lots more behind the scenes lurking.

Those in need of insight have an increasinly hard time measuring and comparing the skills and experience of potential advisors. The above Modern Marketing/PR Pro Fluency Matrix by Adam Singer provides a simplified yet insightful take on the challenge.

What's common and what's rare, what sorts of things prove someone’s savvy and someone else more like shameful?

Many of the points in the top right quadrant come down to personal presence and background, and rightly so. If you’re looking for advice on say entrepreneurship, what’s the value of talking to someone who’s never been an entrepreneur? They may know the theory and tell you what the best books say, but they haven't been in your shoes.

For advice on marketing, public relations and social media, you’ll need someone who is involved. Luckily it’s easy to measure and evaluate by searching and following how the potential advisors behave online.

Are they truly engaged, suspiciously inactive, or perhaps too active to have time to really help others? Do they follow and participate in multiple services and discussions, focus narrowly on a single platform, or blatantly broadcast their views across all available channels?

I'd suggest that it’s worthwhile for organizations to take a look at the graph, keep what's relevant for them and add what's important for their specific situation and need. Then proceed with finding the professional that has what it takes to get you to where you're headed.