I just submitted a 2,700-word package on the state of social media to BtoB Magazine.Here are some summary thoughts based on my research:

We’ve seen this all before –Social media (mainly blogs and wikis) today is uncannily similar to the Internet of a decade ago: there’s intense user activity, with growth rates of more than 100% per year. Users are experimenting with all kinds of new ideas. Some businesses are rushing in to play. Most are hanging back, though, trying to figure out where the payback is. Almost no one is making much money. It’s wild and chaotic and lots of fun, but there’s not much structure to it. That will all change, of course.

ROI is a huge issue –the number one question I hear from businesses about social media is where’s the payback? I don’t have a good answer for that, and, apparently, neither does anyone else. There are lots of intangible benefits, such as career advancement and visibility, but those factors don’t wash with corporate marketers, who are under increasing pressure to demonstrate the return on everything. This will be a problem for social media in the short term, but I believe ROI will become more evident with time. They simply will be no choice but to play here. And that fact will tend to overwhelm any resistance based on financial factors.

The business benefit so far is just listening –several Internet startups are generating good revenue streams by the monitoring and interpreting what’s being said in the blogosophere and elsewhere.Business assigns a value to this and is willing to pay for.They know that focus groups cost a fortune and the blogosphere is a giant, free focus group. They’ll pay good money to take advantage of that.

RSS is the killer app – usage rates are still very low - on the order of 10% - but RSS is the killer technology of social media. The other day, a friend told me about a new technology that embeds RSS feeds in advertising banners to deliver up-to-date within the ads themselves. This is just one iteration of RSS that could change fundamentally the way we distribute information. RSS tracking services are springing up that provide a rich trove of information that clickstream analysis can’t.

However, RSS has got to get easier to use. Cutting and pasting URLs into news readers is primitive and will hold RSS back from wider adoption. But I think everyone knows that, and we should leave it to smart technologists to figure out solutions. The killer app may be some future iteration of a reader that we haven’t even considered. Something has to give this technology the “wow!” factor that it so richly deserves.

Corporations are treading carefully for good reason–I asked in an earlier post why we don’t see more prominent corporate bloggers. I think the reason is that a lot of corporations don’t see the need to blog in the first place. They’re paranoid about controlling their corporate message and they see no benefit to casting off that control in the name of transparency or approachability. This idea might have seemed old school in the pre-compliance day, but corporations are under such intense pressure these days to document and track every single thing they say that I can see that the blogosphere would look to them like a black hole. I’ve talked to some business leaders who are doing very innovative things in social media but who see no for them or their executives to blog. I can’t argue with that thinking.Until the benefits are self-evident to corporations, corporate blogging will not happen in a big way.I believe that will happen, but probably because some business will turn a blog into a big financial windfall and everyone else will feel obligated to follow suit.

Podcasting is the low-hanging fruit –businesses will pay to market on podcasts before they pay to market on blogs. That’s because they understand radio and podcasting’s similarity to it. Emarketer expects podcasting advertising to reach $80 million this year. I’d be surprised if blogs are that big or growing that fast. Certainly, on a CPM basis, they look like the better opportunity.

There is a shadow blogosphere that very few people know about – in recent weeks I’ve come across blogs devoted to manufacturing, engineering, process control, environmentals, energy exploration, supply chain optimization and many other business topics.I wouldn’t have found many of these blogs through conventional channels.I can then follow link paths from one blogger to another.I’m not sure why these blogs aren’t more widely known, but they represent the biggest opportunity for b-to-b marketers to take advantage of social media. Marketers have the expertise to develop their own market-specific expertise and capture the high ground of customer attention. They just need to bring news of the existence of the channel to other interested people.

Bottom line: there’s no doubt in my mind that social media is going to be a huge disruptive force in the way we consume information.Its impact will not be welcome in all segments of business and society, but it will ultimately be a very good thing. Users are way ahead of businesses in the adoption cycle, but that won’t last for long.The inevitable backlash against social new-media is already beginning, and will continue for a while.In the meantime, businesses will “get” the concept and start to spend intelligently on these new channels.And when that happens, watch out.

Ironically, social media’s future looks most promising just as the naysayers are begging to predict its demise.

¶ 9:33 PM