By Mike Myatt, Chief Strategy Officer, N2growth

Social Media 3.0…Okay, I said it and I’m sticking to it. It is time for Social Networking tools, applications and platforms to live up to their potential and make the iterative leap to next generation Social Networking, or “Social Media 3.0″ if you will…While I have no intention of disputing the commercial success of YouTube (Google purchased it for $1.65 Billion dollars when it was only a 9-month old company), FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn, or any number of other organizations that have monetized on their first mover or early adopter advantage, Social Media is still in its infancy. For Social Networking to make the next leap in maturation it will need to move beyond advertising driven consumer models, and evolve to an enterprise class business platform. In today’s post I’ll examine what needs to happen for Social Media to go 3.0…

In a nutshell, here’s my problem with the current status quo of Social Networking…I have more than 6 million contacts in my LinkedIn network alone, and that along with .50 cents won’t even get me a cup of coffee. Okay, I’m being a bit harsh here, but the reality is that if you aggregate all of my contacts, in all of my social networks, I have a very unintuitive, and very large number of data records that don’t seamlessly integrate with one another, and therefore are not very easy to leverage. At present, I’m forced to bolt on various applications and toolsets like contact managers, SFA, CRM, BI, and KM tools to do a poor job of what the next evolution of social networking should accomplish by itself if engineered properly.

As I’ve stated in previous posts, I’m not interested in disparate contacts and data records…I want cohesive relationships, built upon actionable knowledge, which can be used to add value in meaningful ways. Most of all I’m looking for aggregation…I want to be able to efficiently and effectively work between and across various networks in a seamlessly integrated fashion. Those of us in the innovation business have an old saying that states: “You can’t do today’s job with yesterday’s information and survive to be in business tomorrow.” Understanding that we are just dusting the surface with Social Networking is paramount in being able to drive forward. User generated content is well and fine, linking profiles is interesting, but this is child’s play and not where the economic value or social benefit truly lies.

Social Media 3.0 will have more complex ontology, based upon reality mining and social graphing which will be integrated with reasoning and logic engines to produce useful intelligence that will allow businesses to better manage risk and to scale with much greater velocity and precision. One example of next generation Social Networking is IBM’s Atlas solution which maps social networks in the workplace. One of the functions of Atlas is identifying user connections via e-mail, IM, workgroups, duties, responsibilities, reporting lines, etc. An Atlas map shows the importance, value, location, frequency, and relevance of their social network in order to increase productivity and spawn new innovation and collaboration. Simply put, it is more than blogging and commenting…

Bottom line: As the better business minds apply more disciplined rigor in evolving Social Networking to a higher purpose, the rewards for business and society as a whole will be vast…The good news is that it won’t take long. At the current pace of development we’ll see huge advances within the next 12 – 18 months. Buckle-up as the ride will be a fun one…