This post is a bit more personal than what I usually write, but I thought the comments on CIO.com's six hottest new jobs in IT and Are social media and mobile app jobs just fads? both had an interesting slant. I'm not sure of the professional background of the commenters, if they're in IT, or marketing, or social media in a business capacity or not. But the overall view that I got was the sentiment that social media was in their view, a fad, and it would run its course, as fads do.

Obviously, this all remains to be seen, but from my perspective, I don't see a bubble or a fad in social media as a sustainable business marketing model. I do see it maturing and leveling out as mass adoption makes it common. I do see the privacy issues taking a center stage as twitter and other networks that are searchable by google are incorporated into our household appliances, our banks, etc. The fantastical potential uses of social media will level out. But social media and location based mobile technologies are here to stay, in my opinion.

My Early Social Media Experiences
My first corporate social media marketing project was in 2005 with a little company called Phillips. I introduced the idea of creating a user/support community for one of their most popular products, and directed the project. The benefit to the community they built up was impressive, and it gave me a glimmer of my first long-term view of corporate social media - not only to build community, but to sustainably boost revenues.

Before this project, I had integrated social media for short-term profits - although never with a view to making it sustainable. Why? Because being involved in the Search Engine Marketing industry for many years previous to my Phillips project equipped me with an arsenal of tricks to get sites converting and high on search engine results pages. Although clients loved this, I realized that it was only a temporary high. It was like crack, and once Google's brilliant engineers reverse engineered my reverse engineering, they created a more relevant algorithm, and the high was over all to soon.

This is the conundrum some companies face as they start to focus all of their marketing resources on SEO. It can be a roller coaster ride, and revenues can drop to depths they could never imagine when they're on top of the Google roller coaster. Because of the different nature of social media, I don't see social media marketing and mobile marketing giving highs and lows quite so dramatically.

Social Creatures
That different nature of social tools - the emotional connection social media can provide is one of the reasons I've spent the last 6 years focusing on the business impact of social media. Over the years, the tools of social media have grown more sophisticated yet simple. The power of one-to-one communication between consumers, colleagues, businesses, etc has only grown stronger. Human beings crave this - we are emotional beings with a deep-seated need to connect with each other and the world around us. Social media tools have allowed us to intimately connect across distances in a way never before available.

Businesses who take a strategic view of these tools and use them properly to create connections and community with their market will find the added benefit of sustained increased profits.

But judging by the commercial fervor to adopt these tools without considering the value of a strategic and long-term view of these tools, a lot of businesses also seem to think that social media is just a fad, and they'd better jump on the bandwagon before it takes off.

Is this short-term thinking a result of the glut of social media tools being developed? Or does the fault lie with the recent glut of social media “experts” who know how to use the tools, but know little about ROI, strategic marketing, understanding the emotional needs of the customer, the delicate balance of capturing revenue over potential value, etc?

What do you think? Is social media just a fad? Are businesses barking up the wrong tree?