Social media has finally hit the mainstream this year in almost every aspect of our lives. From my observations the focus has been primarily on how it can be used as a marketing or public relations tool.

The term 'social' when applied to media or any other technology for that matter implies something far more profound than enhanced marketing and PR in my humble opinion. It's the new ethos for how we communicate and work together as human beings. It's an ethos we lost during the industrial age and thanks to social technology we're slowly gaining it back.

This video hints at the possibilities of a social ethos taken beyond many of its current uses and into the heart of how we organize our institutions. The focus for me in 2010 and beyond is not how to devise better marketing and PR tactics to 'leverage' social media but for helping businesses understand and embrace 'Being Social' vs. 'Using Social' or 'Engaging in two-way exchange with your stakeholders' vs. 'Using social networking technology as a new broadcast mechanism'.

As individuals and organizations continue the transition from the industrial era information model to the social technology-enabled distributed-network information model there are concepts, principles and rules that we take for granted which are now clearly being turned inside out. The advent of ubiquitous, real time many to many networked communications has initiated such a sudden and dramatic shift in our most fundamental and common activities that it challenges us both intellectually and philosophically.