For the past two years, I have been forecasting the evolution social media will undergo. Key trends for 2010 included social media integration across applications and devices, lowered technological barriers, mobile pervasiveness and social media ROI as a focus. It is safe to say that these trends indeed became reality and I expect these to continue and materialize in new solutions, applications and case studies in the year ahead.

2011 will also be marked by new developments that will shape the very fabric of our behavior, culture and identity. These developments will challenge us to consider important questions about the future of our experience as connected people and consumers. Here are key trends to watch in the coming year:

1. Social media will be supersized

Following the success of various social media SaaS vendors and application providers, and fueled by ?Apple envy,? in 2011 we will see a surge of service providers bundling social networks, engagement widgets, video, mobile capabilities, cloud services and analytics, with their own unique services and proprietary capabilities. Ad agencies, for example, will offer bundles that include layers of creative strategy, campaign management and advertising deals all handled through a central dashboard; telecommunications companies will offer video tools for businesses and consumers with greater bandwidth, storage and syndication; learning management systems (LMS) integrators will add engagement, archiving, training and collaboration tools for a deeper and more engaging academic experience. By the end of the year, using today?s à la cart solutions will seem as efficient as buying a pocket knife with only a bottle opener in it.

2. Companies will integrate social feedback into their decision making process

In 2011 we will see a growing number of companies finally go beyond using social channels merely for building awareness and providing support. As ?social thinkers,? these companies will use the social engine to inform strategic decisions, and execute on the organization?'s objectives, marketing plans, product roadmaps and more. ?It?s not just about technology, it?s about a fundamental shift into a new age of leadership with new type of executives who behave and operate in new ways,? said Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com chairman and CEO. Expect to see a rise in companies who, by end of year, will be recognized for socially-informed innovation, customer focus and work environment, ?much like Zappos and Amazon were a few years back.

3. Mobile will become our gateway to the world

2010 marked the year in which infrastructure, technology and design finally intersected in the mobile space. For the first time, sales of smartphones outpaced sales of desktops and laptops, iPhone and iPad applications were downloaded more than 7 billion times and research shows e-mail access is now on the rise on the iPhone while declining on the computer.

With the foundation in place, in the coming year we will witness the scales tip: Mobile device users will interact with content, companies and the Web more on their phones and iPads than on their computers, and IT and service providers will create solutions that are defined by our mobile consumption and use behaviors. ?The highway has been there but until now we needed a special car to get us to our destination, so the average pedestrian was not going to get there. Now that technology barriers have been lowered, mobile will become an extension of who we are,? said Philippe Suchet, CEO of MyShopanion, and the recipient of the Web2.0? Summit 2010 award for most innovative startup in the mobile shopping category.

From social shopping on the go, to easy paperless transactions and check-ins, to watching (and creating) videos with friends abroad, to in-class learning and collaboration, to managing our health real-time - prepare for an explosion of connected experiences across all points of interactions between people and people, people and companies, and people and information in the cloud.

Photo by LotusHead

4. Video will be everywhere

With plummeting video delivery costs and highly accessible and flexible video management platforms (like Brightcove, Ooyala, and the open-source platform Kaltura*), custom-use of video by enterprises online, on mobile devices, and across screens is on the rise across all sectors.

Consumer? engagement with video will also continue to rise. In October alone, 5.4 billion videos were viewed - 2 billion of these on Facebook. ?People today can shoot and share HD videos from their phone. The user experience is getting to the same level as broadcast or professional media from an image quality standpoint. Image acquisition is entirely changing content production,? said Brett Leonard, renowned writer and director and pioneer of ?frag? technology in the movie industry.

In the coming year, gaps in our video experience will be filled with the integration of filtering, tagging, editing and locating tools into each and every video feed. Both companies and consumers will increasingly rely on video to provide information and behavioral cues that are not otherwise present in texts, tweets and status updates, making video a critical component of the value chain for its impact on shaping people?s' perception about companies and about each other.

5. The next big Online Social Network will not be a network at all

Social networks have transformed human access capabilities much like modern transportation and the telephone did over 150 years ago. But they are also changing the very structure of our relationships? - flattening our naturally varying levels of intimacy in real life.

In the coming year we will see the rise of dynamic, engaging, easy-to-use community platforms and applications like Diaspora, Path and Looppa* that will better mimic and facilitate the innate way people seek to manage relationships. ?People today look for more personalized, authentic, private information (where we make) a ?social contract? around a topic or context that is beyond the reach of search engine results and Facebook crowds,? said Dave Blakely, director of technology strategy at IDEO.

For consumers, this means the ability to create smaller, more intimate, context-specific communities using their existing social graph and livestreams. For companies, this means the ability to facilitate a custom-branded, dynamic and engaging experience on their online properties in ways not possible on Facebook. ?Every company should think of itself as a media company,? said Tom Foremski, journalist and thought-leader.

As they become more social, on their own turfs, companies will once again own their customer relationships and brand in a whole new way, ?ultimately building greater community value for both the company and its customers.

6. ROI will be redefined

When it comes to ROI, it seems that companies want to cook gourmet risotto but most are still busy washing the rice: Despite 2010 being a year filled with ROI discussions and some strong case studies, Forrester research shows that most companies still have no clue how to meaningfully measure ROI.

As brands move this year from being on social media to using the social media ecosystem, ROI metrics will finally evolve beyond counting ?likes? and comments. Aligning with actionable business objectives and their corresponding metrics will be critical to being able to demonstrate repeatable contribution to the bottom line. Companies who hire social media strategists with proven marketing analytics background and business strategy experience will have the upper hand and will place first in the race to cracking the ROI code.

7. Psychology is shifting

Until now, human psychology has been regarded slow to change. In the coming year we will begin to see evidence that we are, in fact, witnessing a growing psychological plasticity.

?We have changed the importance of time, geography, age? and the assumption of how the world works. We have new levels of cognitive flexibility, which is creating a new way of thinking about the world and about ourselves,? said Dr. Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Center and co-founder of A Think Lab.

Once feeling powerless to fight against personal and cultural injustices, today people know they have the power to voice their grievances, the tools to bring about change and the ability to take control of their experiences.

As the constructs of relationships, privacy and our ability to influence others evolve, we will also face important questions: How do we respond to the changing definition of relationships? How does the elimination of behavioral cues, only available face-to-face, impact our ability to connect? How does our need for emotional balance get addressed in the face of constant change?

In the coming year, companies wishing to succeed should already start to set practices and create a charter to understand the intersection between technology and psychology. Focusing on behaviors is no longer sufficient.

8. Citizen activism brings back purpose and power

With the power made possible by social technologies to connect, inform and mobilize, we will see a surge in self-organized and managed citizen activism. ?Value will come from being able to facilitate groups as a human infrastructure?, not from technology,? says Andrea Saveri, a thought-leader and researcher at the intersection of foresight and strategy.

Wikipedia and Mozilla FireFox are early and ongoing examples of the value of the connected human infrastructure; many more, including Causecast, and OpenIDEO, as well as lesser known projects like It Gets Better will light up the grid. By the end of the year we may each join a group of people we have never met in order to take part in bringing about change in completely new ways.

9. Social business intelligence will heat up and so will privacy

As we become ever more connected, and rely on giants like Apple and Google to funnel our most personal information, the field of social business intelligence, and with it, our privacy, will move to the spotlight. Wikileak?s' eruption on the social media waves and Do Not Track are just previews. Every company now looks to tap into the boundless user data being collected in the cloud. While personalized, targeted experience can be extremely valuable in helping companies and consumers cut through the clutter, the line between perceived use and abuse can be thin at times, as data mining and targeted ad delivery pioneer RapLeaf saw in past months.

In the year ahead we will witness (and be part of) major data virtualization initiatives designed to map our activities, preferences and choices. Mechanisms designed to triangulate our mobile, online and physical information will yield more accurate information than our Social Security numbers can. We will see fierce regulation battles and hear about companies who use our data to test boundaries? and our trust. When done, Tom Cruise?'s shopping scene in Minority Report will seem as sophisticated as scenes from Time Tunnel in the 1970?s.

10. The role of the social media strategist will be changing

The glory days when social media strategists rose to stardom overnight (and too often, with little relevant experience) are finally over. Social media roles today focus on tangible, results-driven capabilities within the organizational structure and processes. Hiring managers are more informed and better connected, making it easier to separate the wheat from the chaff.

In 2011, social media strategists will need to contend with much more actionable, and often mundane, tasks such as selecting and piloting new tools, integrating social widgets and analytics, helping to educate the organization, and integrating social-based thinking into the organization?'s process and culture. Process design, stakeholder management, strategic planning, and the ability to manage large projects within complex environments will all be required.

Strategists looking to remain inspired and work at the cutting edge will have to look outside today'?s leading corporations. Some of the most interesting social media work will come from new media digital agencies, smaller innovative companies, international companies who are just entering the field and late-to-adopt sectors such as health, finance and insurance.

In the year ahead we will see more of the same: more users on Facebook, more videos, more social media widgets, more tools, more devices, more applications. But it will also be a year of important accomplishments and fundamental shifts in our thinking, behavior and psychology. As social media and social technologies integrate deeper into our daily lives and across vast audiences, our areas of focus will begin to transform.

Companies will begin to overhaul their internal structures and decision-making processes even if at a fairly superficial levels at first; consumers will seek to make sense of their evolving relationships, always-on connectedness, and to redefine value and meaning.

As we finally surface from social media stimulus overload, the questions we will ask in the coming year should not be about technology but about what it enables, what it jeopardizes and about how we, as the connected collective, want to shape the years to come.

(Disclaimer: Companies marked with * are Ustrategy clients.)

This guest post was written by Ravit Lichtenberg, founder and chief strategist at Ustrategy.com - a boutique consultancy focusing on helping companies succeed. Ravit authors a blog at www.ravitlichtenberg.com.

Today, it is impossible to separate social media from the online world. Facebook reached 350 million users last month -- 70% of whom are outside the US -- and it accounts for 25% of the Web's traffic, according to Pew nearly one in five people on the web use Twitter or some other service to check status messages, and 94% of enterprises plan to maintain or increase their investment in enterprise social media tools. The social media conversation is no longer considered a Web 2.0 fad -- it is taking place in homes, small businesses and corporate boardrooms, and extending its reach into the nonprofit, education and health sectors. From feeling excitement, novelty, bewilderment, and overwhelmed, a growing number of people now speak of social media as simply another channel or tactic.

So what will social Web bring next? What will "being connected" mean? What will the next experience be for the 2 two billion people who are connected to the Internet? Here are 10 ways what we've called social media will evolve in 2010.

Social Media Will Become a Single, Cohesive Experience Embedded In Our Activities and Technologies

By this time next year, social media will no longer be "social media" -- it will be an integrated, unquestionable component of your online and offline experience. Last year we spoke of cross-platform integration across media sites. Open APIs and OpenID made that possible, and even LinkedIn announced last month that it too will finally open its APIs. 2010 will be about integration and a single, cohesive experience across platforms as well as across products and devices -- Web, mobile, TV, and video -- will become near-inseparable experiences.

Users will access content from any device or platform, co-create and mashup their photos, videos and text with traditional content while interacting with each other. Publishers will create new kinds of content for the connected world, and the last years' lull in good entertainment will finally be lifted. This trend will cut across all of our activities -- from playing games to shopping to emailing and texting -- nothing will be lost; everything we do will be gathered and streamed together, allowing people to view their world of activities as if it were projected in front of them, open to change, review and input at any point in time from any device or online tool.

Social Media Innovation Will No Longer Be Limited By Technology

With Web technology maturing and the near-elimination of previous barriers such as closed platforms and discrete logins, companies will now look to innovate the way they use existing technology, rather than focus on technology enhancements themselves. We will see a move to leverage existing assets -- content and capabilities -- in new ways, turning information to wisdom and insight to action. Whereas once user research required focus groups and usability tests, companies will utilize the Web's capabilities to achieve the same. Naturally occurring conversations will be utilized in product innovation and design, and companies will create incentives for people's attention and engagement while repurposing and analyzing content and engagement in new ways that will deliver valuable input.

Mobile Will Take Center Stage

Worldwide, the iPhone alone accounts for about 33% of mobile web traffic and IDC predicts the number of mobile web users will hit one billion by 2010. As the technological barriers come down, people will increasingly use their phones on-the-go to access social networks, search, read content and find location-based information. Our phones will be used as a central hub and beacon -- enabling a slew of new capabilities and experiences.

Expect an Intense Battle As People and Companies Look To Own Their Own Content

2009 marked the year of open Web, and divergence of content, making content available anywhere, anytime, by anyone and to everyone; it was the year content exploded across the web, platforms and devices. The issue Google solved so magically -- content find-ability -- will become all but moot in the coming years. Instead, content relevance and quality will become the key focus. In 2010 we will start to see convergence as companies take measures to own their own content, its location and its cost. Last month, Rupert Murdoch announced he may opt News Corp out of Google, instructing it to de-index its publications from the search engine and giving exclusive rights to Bing for a fee. This means that content publishers will be able to determine where they make their content available and at what cost.

With the growth of user generated content and the dwindling relevance of search results, people will gradually shift their trust from large aggregators like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, and move to searching and finding content at specific locations and, eventually, creating and integrating their own content hub into the rest of their personal digital experience. "People don't realize that everything they do -- on Facebook, Ning, Google and with their credit cards -- is being collected, tracked, analyzed, owned and monetized by these companies who provide (so-called) free services. It's not a healthy model." Says John Faber, COO of af83, a Drupal development house and co-founder of the upcoming DrupalCon.

Enterprises Will Shape the Next Generation of What We've Called "Social Media"

It was easy to forget that enterprises and large institutions are the originators of some of social media's pillars: listservs, forums, intranets and collaboration tools. As social media became a public domain, enterprises have been cautious participants, predominantly in the product space, with few visionary leaders like Zappos, IBM and Dell. But cautionary they are no more. With a reported average of 25% increase in funds allocation toward social media activities, in 2010 we will see a surge in adoption of social media across product, services and solutions companies.

Having the need and the funds, enterprises will determine the next generation of social experiences. They will push enhancements that meet their needs, specifically around monitoring, automation, alignment with the sales cycle and integration with existing systems, expanding social "media" to encompass the ecosystem of social computing across solutions, and making them actionable for the company. Jive, blueKiwi, Remindo and Sharepoint support companies internally. Most recently, Salesforce.com released Chatter, designed to turn the corporation, and CRM, social. With its APIs opening later this year, "Chatter can become a new layer over its Force platform, already being used by 68,000 customers, enabling companies and developers to leverage the Salesforce infrastructure in a secure environment," said Bruce Francis, VP corporate strategy Salesforce.com.

ROI Will Be Measured -- and It Will Matter

Return on investment on social media activities has been challenging to most companies this year. Surveys show only 18% of companies say they saw meaningful return on investment from their social media activities while the other 72% report modest, no return or inability to measure the return on their investment in social media. While the definition of ROI is evolving to better fit the world of relationships and networks, the ability to demonstrate ROI in hard numbers -- not in followers or fans -- will become a baseline business requirement in 2010. Already, both traditional firms and startups are working feverishly to demonstrate they can turn hype into science. But, only those companies who will be able to analyze and predict hard returns on investments will last.

Finally: Real, Cool and Very Bizarre Online-Offline Integration

Virtual worlds, games and avatars were just the beginning of the online-offline integration. In 2010 we'll see a greater push on this front as distance and physical walls will matter even less. Augmented reality -- already integrated into Yelp's latest geo-tagging enabled application -- will allow users to find relevant information and people depending on their location; Twitter360 will help people find each other, connect and see updates by location all while on the go through their mobile device. People will be able to scan products on shelves but process the sale online; you'll never need to ask for a business card again at events -- and you may actually get promotions and discounts that match your interests.

Many "Old" Skills Will Be Needed Again

An economic downturn coupled with the surge of social media eliminated many traditional marketing and PR roles. But this year, we'll see the return of professionals to the field. Enterprises will turn back to marketers who specialize in understanding customer psychology and who are experienced in addressing these both offline and online. Research and development divisions will turn to customer experience professionals to draw on user needs and ideation as part of their product improvement and innovation process, and sales and support will continue to deliver services online. Expect to see job postings for social media managers, social media psychologists and social media executive administrators to help manage the infinite tasks involved with communities and social media campaigns.

Women Will Rule Social Media

2009 revealed the growing role women play online. Women make 75% of all buying decisions for the home, and 85% of all consumer purchases. Social networks have at least 50% female members, and it is women ages 35-55 who make up the fastest-growing population on Facebook -- not the expected Gen-Y population as previously anticipated. Previously limited by organizational hierarchies and job demands, women today are free to create, express and promote themselves using social media channels. Innately excelling at communication, relationship building and multi-level attention, women will take the reins on their careers and network becoming both a sought-after consumer segment as well as driving business strategies for social-media-connected companies.

Social Media Will Move Into New Domains

As social media becomes integrated into our experiences online, it will have an impact on verticals such as nonprofit, job training, education, and health care. University of the People -- a UN-backed initiative to offer free education in emerging markets -- is using the power of distance learning and virtual collaboration. Obama's campaign for job training also highly relies on the power of online interaction. "The top 10 companies to work for are going to become learning companies. Instead of having 10% of time to philanthropic activities, they'll spend 10% of time on learning or teaching," says Chris Heuer, founder of Social Media Club and director at iStrategyLabs.

"Sites like I'm Too Young For This, and Know Cancer Community prove that no topic is too complex for social collaboration. These site help people connect and share information previously only available to their doctors," says Jennifer Benz of Benz Communications, a consultancy that works with companies to introduce social media capabilities into employee benefits and health care communication. "Companies who integrate social collaboration and conversation into health care find they have more knowledgeable employees and patients who can make smarter choices and improve the quality of their care."

Social media as we knew it even 6 months ago has changed. By this time next year, it will have become fully integrated into everything we do online and offline. By the end of this year we'll see a move toward greater control over content and companies will fight over social media land grabs in preparation for the future.

By next year, we will no longer speak about social media technology but about what we've been able to do with it. We will discuss power of ownership and only accept quality, relevant content. As we move to automatically accept a narrowed selection of the mass content online, we will begin to crave larger reach again and the natural process of chaos and order -- constriction and expansion, convergence and divergence -- will repeat itself in an ever-accelerating pace.

Whether you are an individual, a startup, small business or a large corporation, an online presence and an ongoing conversation with your constituents is a baseline requirement -- and will take time and expertise. Companies are diverting resources and rethinking their traditional outreach strategies. "Whether you're recruiting, looking for investment, trying to get buzz -- you need to be visible," says John Nogrady, director, emerging business at Microsoft bizpark, and serial entrepreneur. Brian Zisk, founder of SFMusicTech, which is taking place in San Francisco this week, says "If you're out there as a genuine contributor in the community you can reach out to many people. Take the FooFighters' free Facebook concert, or Zoe Keating -- a local artist with over 1.2 million fans online. Their ability to connect with their fans was made possible because of the Internet."

As you read this, it may seem far reaching but so did a presidency won through the power of online community not too long ago. Whether you are a novice finally giving in to the pressures to "get on social media," someone who is highly experienced, or a visionary already looking for the next big thing, you will play a role in social media in the coming year even through your simple, daily actions. And as the social media wave dissipates into the vast ocean of connected experiences, the term itself will become an entry in dictionaries and encyclopedias and we will embark on a new era of knowledge, accessibility and experiences unbound by distance, time or physical walls.

Photo by Francois Bouly

In reality, open-source software provides stable solutions, created by people and for people and used by companies of all sizes. Use Firefox? That's open-source software. Google Chrome? It too is based on an open-source code. Ever look up a term on Wikipedia? The site is completely built on user-generated code and content. "In fact," says Allison Randal, Program Chair of OSCON, "chances are you're using a lot more open-source software than you know: on your computer or powering you favorite websites."

With the Open Source Convention (OSCON) set to take over San Jose tomorrow, we'll provide a glimpse here of open source in layman's terms and the potential intersection of open source and social media.

Author: Ravit Lichtenberg is the founder and chief strategist at Ustrategy.com -- a boutique consultancy focusing on helping companies succeed. Ravit works with CEOs, marketing groups, and social media managers to craft customer-centric engagement strategies that result in higher customer value, stronger customer community, improved monetization, and higher profitability. Ravit authors a blog at www.ravitlichtenberg.com.

What Is Open Source?

"The ideas behind open source are about freedom," continues Randal, "that people should have certain basic rights in the software that they use, the same as every other part of life. It's about people's rights to create things they're passionate about."

Mozilla's founders, who spawned Firefox, walked away from the ashes of Netscape with a desire to change the Web browsing experience. Drupal and Joomla are content management systems that enable unlimited options in website building and publishing. Remember how difficult it used to be to build your own website? Now building one is free, open to all, flexible, and extendable: anyone with a passion or idea can build for it, and numerous companies are taking Drupal and Joomla and building easy-to-use website templates that anyone can use, no programming needed. Don't want to pay for Microsoft Office? You can use OpenOffice for free -- it will serve most of your needs.

In essence, these projects, developers, and organizations address mature, business-critical issues in better, faster ways. This form of crowd-sourcing enables businesses to use solutions that would otherwise have required a lot more time and/or people to develop at a much higher total cost.

Open Source Is Evolving

You may have heard the phrase, "Open Source is free as in speech, not as in beer." This phrase refers to the notion that while everyone can freely start and contribute to any project, the actual use of open source solutions may still come with a price tag -- often for services and additional product layers that a company bundles with the open code. But for corporations that already spend millions of dollars just to keep the lights on, investing in open source increasingly makes better business sense. For the CIOs and CTOs of these companies, it's not about the price tag of each solution but rather about the total cost of ownership over time, especially in a downturn economy.

In a study conducted by Gartner and reported by Matt Asay at CNET, CIOs reported they have increased investment in open-source software and decreased investment in proprietary software. CIOs reported that by investing in open source they were able to do the following:

• Reduce costs by 87% (while meeting or exceeding expectations),
• Improve quality by 92%,
• Ease integration and customization by 86%,
• Quicken pace of innovation by 82%,
• Improve support by 84%,
• Increase standards compliance by 91%,
• Decrease time to market by 82%.

Michael Fauscette, Group Vice-President of Software Business Solutions at IDC, recently highlighted changes in the adoption of open source. IDC found that as recently as 2007, CIOs were reluctant to adopt social media software for fear of IP infringement and poor support: two mission-critical elements of any enterprise. By 2008, says Fauscette, CIOs reported that they preferred open-source software precisely because of the quality of support it comes with. And as for their fear of IP infringement, that was no longer at the top of the list because of standards and self-policing.

Open source doesn't only serve IT companies, though. It is now being explored for government and health care data management and access. Open-source software, in other words, has moved from the basements of Linkin Park fans to the desks of the largest corporations in the US.

Sound familiar? The evolution of open source may sound a bit like the evolution of another web-related phenomenon, what has become known as Web 2.0 social media and social networking. Like open-source software, social media is about the basic human right to communicate, organize, and maintain control of one's own experiences. And both address the needs of companies to do more at higher quality with less money. Both social media and open-source software involve communities and are fed by content: code in the case of open source, and media content in the case of social media.

But unlike open source, social media has thus far primarily been a consumer play and is only now being explored by enterprises. Living on the Web, social media is also hardware and distribution-channel agnostic: it does not require pre-installation and does not compete with pre-bundled proprietary products. Historically, open source, being hardware dependent, has had greater distribution challenges: unless the software came pre-loaded on your hardware, notes Fauscette, you would rarely seek out alternatives to replace what you already have. Without a channel for hardware, distribution was driven primarily by hard-core tech enthusiasts.

Seeds of Change

Companies that erected insurmountable barriers to protect their source code now realize that the cost of innovation and competition may be just too much compared to that of their competitors that use open-source software. Take Google's Android, an iPhone competitor built on the open-source platform Linux. Android started off as closed-source software but very quickly became an open-source project. Developers can now build applications on top of Android's platform and then use the code for their own Android-like products, just as developers use Firefox code to build their own browsers.

2008 saw another significant milestone: the establishment of the Symbian Foundation to oversee the development of the Symbian operating system as an open-source platform, licensed under the Eclipse Public License (EPL). The Foundation's members include Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, NTT DoCoMo, Texas Instruments, Vodafone, Samsung, LG, and AT&T. With this development, a once highly protected closed-source cell-phone operating system has opened up.

Caleb Sima, Chief Technologist at Hewlett-Packard, calls this "a clear move on Nokia's part to try to catch up to the competition by using open source and the community to help evolve its features to those of smartphones." Companies are now realizing that open-source software is a competitive advantage.

What Open Source Means to Social Media

Open source is the natural platform for fast-evolving social media and social networking. Forget about having to scale the walled gardens of social networks or having to upload, download, and link together multiple applications. With open source, everything is seamless and transparent. Picture a huge festive dinner table, set with dozens of mouth-watering dishes for you and your guests to pick from. You can heap whatever you like on your plate or, better yet, just dab your bread into whatever dish your please, all while seeing what others are putting on their plate and seeing whether they're using a fork or a spoon and hearing the conversation around the table.

But with all of these capabilities and openness, people will face new challenges on the Web. One big challenge will be to make the Web more personal and make it possible to simulate live interaction. One of the most promising companies to address this is Kaltura, maker of the only open-source online video management platform, with a free community platform, now used on over 35,000 websites and soon to be integrated into Wikipedia for user co-creation of rich media content. (Disclaimer: Kaltura is one of my client companies.)

"Extensions like Kaltura make the Web real," says Fauscette. "Video is in fact one of the big things we'll see. This is an opportunity space, and first-mover advantage will be big." For Fauscette, trust is a major sticking point: with the proliferation of networks, friends, followers, and brands online, helping people figure out who and what to trust will be key to making the Web personal.

Whoever tries to control people's relationships will lose. Whoever enables people to create and share experiences that are relevant to them across any website, with anyone, the way they want will win. And open source will create many more winners than losers.

More About Open Source

OSCON is celebrating its 10th year anniversary this coming week in a four-day conference in San Jose, California. In addition to the usual technical tracks, OSCON has added people and business tracks and many free events. You can register for a free pass to the expo hall (yes, free as in beer) and attend the "Birds of a Feather" un-conference, Ignite party, Hackathon, and much more (all free). Check out the list of events.

Great resources online include Open Source Initiative Open Government, Open Data Initiatives, SourceForge (where you can find a list of ongoing projects and downloads), Open Video Alliance, and the excellent short and sweet write-ups by open-source experts such as CNET's Matt Asay.

Oh, and there's always Wikipedia (where smiles are always open).

Gradually, but extremely well, customers are learning to sound their voices for everyone to hear. Gone are the days when a customer needed to write a letter to an anonymous clerk at a random PO box address, leaving response to chance and corrective action to a Hanukkah miracle. Customers today can sound their likes and dislikes at anytime across multiple media, uncensored: no smart nephew, neighbor with a printer, or attorney needed.

Author: Ravit Lichtenberg is the founder and chief strategist at Ustrategy.com -- a boutique consultancy focusing on helping companies succeed. Ravit works with CEOs, marketing groups, and social media managers to craft customer-centric engagement strategies that result in higher customer value, stronger customer community, improved monetization, and higher profitability. Ravit authors a blog at www.ravitlichtenberg.com.

Corporations are recognizing this shift as well. To survive, brands know they must interact with their customers in new ways across all channels: from outbound marketing to product feedback to sales to support. They also know that as undefined as the space is at the moment, they must take a highly creative and strategic approach to connecting with their customers online and offline. There is no corporate manual yet, no large consultancy slideshow to refer to. Customers themselves are setting the rules, which is a challenging model for most large corporations.

But some enterprises are starting to figure it out. They try different approaches, push the boundaries of experimentation, and continually test themselves, asking their customers to play judge. BurgerKing's WhopperSacrifice campaign is one example. When else has a large corporation asked people to sacrifice 10 of their friends? The campaign resulted in a whopping 233,906 people interacting with the brand in a new way (and to great controversy, always a good sign). Starbucks tried a safer approach after customer backlash against the automated coffee brewers it introduced in its stores. The MyStarbucksIdea campaign brought back some customers and put baristas back behind the coffee machines.

So what makes some brands more successful than others when interacting with customers online? What sets them apart? Here are five fundamental requirements for brands that want to form relationships with their customers in a Web 2.0 world:

1. Be a Panther, Not a Dinosaur

Size, complexity, and distance from the end customer play a substantial part in any enterprise's ability to effectively connect with customers. The closer a company's employees are to end customers and the more direct contact C-level executives have with customers, the faster the company will be able to adapt to new means of customer interaction, to allocate budget, and to get everyone on board with an actionable plan.

Zappos' CEO, Tony Hsieh, grew his company into a $1 billion a year retailer with his unmitigated commitment to customers. Hsieh applied a dynamic method early on, changing Zappos' offerings constantly and agilely (free shipping, new product lines, 360-day return policy) until they fit customers just right. Corporations today must learn agility, be able to adapt and change quickly, and commit to making all decisions based on customer benefit. The corporate dinosaur will not survive for long.

2. Evolve Your Organizational Culture and Structure

While some brands, like Disney and Zappos, have always put the customer at the center of their organizational culture, others, like Wal-Mart and Panda Express, are just now figuring out the importance of aligning their internal culture with their customers' culture. This evolution is easier for brands that are already structured around their customers, but for others it will be trial and error.

No matter how it gets there, every enterprise -- whether B2C or B2B -- will have to evolve its culture in the coming three to five years to survive. This evolution means re-examining traditional approaches to inbound and outbound customer outreach and being willing to shift ownership and re-structure so that each and every employee is responsible for the customer experience. Organizations will likely become flatter and return to cultivating leaders from within who can move the organizational culture forward.

3. Understand that Loyalty Is Key to Revenue

For most people, the mere thought of switching online banking providers and having to re-enter all of their information in a new system is dreadful enough that they just don't do it. Cell phone carriers in the US have contract termination fees that are higher than the cost of most phones. These companies rely less on loyalty than on "customer hijacking."

Other companies, including software and hardware manufacturers such as Dell, HP, and Lenovo, cannot constrict customer choice. These companies compete for mostly similar markets -- offering similar products, services, and prices -- and are after customer loyalty most of all. Ask any of these three corporations what it would like to be when it grows up, and it will point to Apple. Apple is the gold standard for generating customer loyalty -- no ransom required.

As Web 2.0 breaks down the walls among customers and between customers and brands, the tie between loyalty and revenue will grow even stronger, and brands that hold customers hostage will be deserted for those that provide real value. A corporation's ability to demonstrate value and secure loyalty will now be measured by their presence and customer relationships online.

4. Bring in the Right People

Traditional consultancies like McKinsey and Bain were once valuable to corporations because of their subject matter expertise. They provided top-down know-how that was adopted by executives and pushed down the chain of command. This approach is completely useless for expanding a corporation's connection to customers online. The right people today possess two key qualities. The first, which is the more easily found of the two, is "in the trenches" experience. People with this quality regularly interact with others online, use various social media conversation tools, are passionate about communities, and can mobilize others with a 140-character line.

The second, much more difficult to find, is the ability to articulate and translate this in-the-trenches knowledge in a way that makes sense to corporations. The right people for an enterprise's interactions with customers have to be able to connect the new psychology of customers with the traditional way in which corporations work. They must know how to help corporations create new strategies, foster change management, and create action plans that lead to clear and measurable results. Corporations will have a tough time finding people with just the right combination of qualities and capabilities; but once found, these emissaries will deliver crucial and uncompromising value to the customer-oriented corporation in the Web 2.0 world.

5. Have a Strategy!

Brands today that have an effective online presence didn't just stumble on the right formula. Getting things right takes work, commitment, experimentation, and genuine care. Whether they realize it or not, brands that are successful in social media have always acted on strategies. They have always set clear goals, developed a plan to reach those goals, and put budgets and people behind them.

Before Web 2.0, Southwest Airlines was the poster child of great customer service. Today, Zappos does for online retail what Southwest did for the discount airline industry. Wal-Mart may not pay its merchants to blog, but the merchants' time is paid for with their salaries. Corporations today, more than ever, need to reassess their strategies and ensure that those strategies are an expression of their desire to move forward rather than fear of losing momentum or control.

Having a Twitter or Facebook page is not a strategy. Nor is it very effective to hire community managers and charge them with reducing marketing dollars. The corporation today must first figure out its goals in the Web 2.0 world, set relevant metrics, invest in understanding customer needs, and map out an actionable plan it can implement. Only then will its full potential in the online social world be realized.

With 68% of online adults using one or more social media tools and 42% of online adults reporting an interest in at least one type of social application from brands they like, enterprises cannot ignore the changing landscape of customer relationships. In the coming years, corporations will not survive on product lines and competitive pricing alone. For corporations to remain competitive, they will need to become more flexible, put people at the center of their culture, and remain dynamically attentive to human needs. It is time again to realize that change should be embraced, not feared, and to put in place the right structures, strategies, and people to support this change.

Author: Ravit Lichtenberg is the founder and chief strategist at Ustrategy.com -- a boutique consultancy focusing on helping companies succeed. Ravit works with CEOs, marketing groups, and Social Media managers to craft customer-centric engagement strategies that result in higher customer value, stronger customer community, improved monetization, and higher profitability. Ravit authors a blog at www.ravitlichtenberg.com.

Facebook made more news in recent weeks when the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) announced it would file a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission over Facebook's updated privacy terms, which essentially make user information the property of Facebook and give it free reign to use it as it may.

By now Facebook should be accustomed to criticism. Despite having had a tremendous growth spurt, it seems to be on a trial-and-error journey, guided by an ever-changing map and an elusive destination. In a way, it acts like a child in transition to puberty, slow to catch up on change, impressed by its new-found power, and definitely not bothered by such nuisances as "planning" for its future. But in the end, by will or by force, it too will have to grow up. What can Facebook do to make the transition less painful? What will it take for Facebook to start thinking like the grown-up company it is becoming?

Better to Have B-Level Strategy but A-Level Execution

That's what Kulwant Singh, Dean of the National University of Singapore's Business School, told us each day when we entered his classroom. It's a pretty basic principle, but one of the toughest for companies to uphold.

Facebook is still a pretty simple business: it is an online platform that facilitates community-building and provides multiple methods and points of interaction for users to express themselves and connect and share with each other. Its strategies, then, should also be pretty simple and its execution near flawless. That hasn't been the case, however. Facebook has failed to demonstrate that it is truly able to monetize its platform, and it continues to invest in meaningless endeavors, such as the recent redesign. This is due not to a lack of vision or talent but rather to the mile-long canyon between Facebook's strategy and its ability to execute.

Facebook's Strategy Simplified

In a recent interview, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO, said the company will be focusing on growing its community and on monetization. To add some clarity to an otherwise generic statement, we can say that Facebook's strategy most likely includes these three key goals:

1. Increase user base. Grow network effect even beyond the current 175 million user base.
2. Increase wallet share. Leverage existing platform and find new ways to make money (e.g. applications, advertising, revenue share on partnerships, paid services).
3. Maintain and grow leadership in social media/networks. Effectively compete with and beat other online media platforms and tools on which users spend time and money, or form a partnership (like with Twitter) for a piece of the action.

As with all strategic plans, each of these goals can be further broken down into multiple objectives, each of which has its own specific requirements. All that's left to do is execute them. But in Facebook's case, the flow from strategy to execution is disjointed, resulting in a very bad case of broken telephone. What should have been a relatively easy and flawless execution has turned into a terrible blunder that continues to put Facebook in the hot seat for not realizing its potential.

Facebook Vision Realized

While it may have started out as a project by a couple of passionate students, Facebook today, like most successful startups, is in the business of making money. Advancing this vision does not mean spending what must have been countless hours of team meetings to discuss the corner radius on the new profile chicklets. Nor does it mean risking getting sued for quietly attempting to take over user data. It's time to lay down some fundamental principles to help Facebook bridge strategy and execution:

1. Start thinking like the large company you are becoming. Instead of kneejerk responses to competition and internal whim, Facebook needs to set a long-term vision and work backwards, taking into consideration priorities, technological capabilities, and company as well as (most importantly) user needs. When a company knows what targets to keep its eyes on, it can choose one of many roads depending on the circumstances at the time.
2. Choose an identity and stick with it. Is Facebook a fun startup, or a large successful company? Engineers and geeks, or business people? Is it about connecting or sharing information? The next couple of years are going to shape Facebook's identity and redefine its culture, focus, and value proposition. Planning ahead by testing a few ideas can be of tremendous help to reducing noise and confusion.
3. Listen to your users. It's not just about blogs, notes, and user comments. Facebook should proactively seek to understand its growing base of user segments, their needs and desires, and their relationship to upcoming technologies and Facebook's own strategic objectives. This will enable Facebook to design a complete experience (not thumbnails) that turns users into customers, while making it extremely difficult for competitors to match the experience.
4. Grow with your market segments: While Facebook may have started with tech-savvy early adopters, it is now certainly crossing the chasm and attracting different user segments. Does Facebook understand the value proposition it offers to each of these segments? What about the growing base of 35- to 49-year-olds who are now flocking to social networks? Does Facebook know how to keep its original evangelists active? Keeping a close eye on these evolving segments and making sure its services speak to their unique needs will be key to Facebook's success.
5. Implement a co-creation architecture. Facebook could learn a great deal from the open-source environment by creating both feedback and contribution channels. The addition of OpenID and the increased flexibility for developers were significant steps forward, but they need to be integrated into a more holistic tool set and be linked to a strategy that answers more than, "How do we make money off our users?"
6. Dare to change. Fear of change is one of the greatest pitfalls of established businesses and makes it easier for startups to take a significant share from them. Apple's iPhone, BlueNile, and Zappos are but a few examples. Only by focusing on the whole experience and daring to break out of its own mold will Facebook maintain momentum and growth.
7. Seal those gaps. This is a tough one for most people, more so for companies. It means pulling up the curtains, going from room to room, and figuring out what works and what doesn't. It also means sitting down and devising a strategy to address all those gaps in a way that enhances the business while not hindering its operation. Not an easy task, but crucial for growth.
8. Stay honest. Stating that public-figure pages are good for users is borderline disingenuous, and placing friends' photos on ads is probably grounds for lawsuits. Take the example of Hulu CEO Jason Kilar, who says clearly that ads mid-program are Hulu's way of monetizing an otherwise free platform. Facebook should clearly distinguish between pursuing business objectives and meeting users' needs and should thus communicate the true intent of its actions.

For a people-based business, it's shocking how little attention Facebook pays to understanding its own users. Less shocking is how poorly it has been executing its strategy, given the nature of this developmental stage it is going through. Parents often look for signs that those terrible teenage years are over and that their child is finally coming out of his or her self-involved state. For Facebook, this will happen when execution matches strategy, when the terms "user" and "customer" are integral to every single one of its strategic goals, when useless design tweaks finally meet their end, and when Facebook provides services and goods that users actually want. If nothing else, though, we can always take comfort in knowing that teenagers don't stay teenagers for long.

But social media today is a pure mess: it has become a collection of countless features, tools, and applications fighting for a piece of the pie.

Facebook, a once groundbreaking online community, has become the ant colony of third-party applications. Twitter users now have a dozen or so additional applications they can use to overcome Twitter's ever-present shortcomings. People spread themselves across a number of tools and maintain different networks on each (large portions of which they don't even know), making it nearly impossible to decide what to share and with whom.

Users, marketers, and companies face an incredible amount of noise, too. For every new application that relies on a network, another crops up that helps users manage it. While "eyeballs" used to be the coveted metric, both ad publishers and investors now realize that having smaller well-targeted niches can lead to much better returns than marketing to one large undifferentiated mass of users.

Meaning and connection -- two key anchors of all things social media -- are corroding by the day as people's ability to organize their experiences and find the relevance of their networks declines. Social media, in essence, is bumping up against its own ceiling, no longer able to serve the needs of those living within its walls; and for these reasons, social media as we know it is changing course.

Social Media is Evolving

Social media is morphing into a holistic experience that speaks to people's social needs in new ways. If you are a CEO of a startup who is focusing on the next generation of social media, here are 10 areas you'll need to take into consideration in the coming year:

1. It's About People

We're moving away from "users," "customers," and "shoppers": social media is bringing back the human element to all digital interaction. People now deliberately seek meaningful connection, self-expression, and a relevant and receptive community. Forrester's Social Technographic research and Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff's Groundswell represent a huge step towards a new kind of behavior-driven segmentation, but companies that want to succeed will need to take it further and tap into people's evolving needs, using the social media context as the new baseline.

2. Creating Meaning and Value

Social media will no longer be about features and applications. These have become a dime a dozen. People will be looking to get tangible and relevant value out of their social experience; they'll be looking for meaning and for order. "Social media online is no different from social media offline," said Brent Csutoras at a recent Social Media Club event. People will be looking for ways to keep their networks going regardless of device or platform. They will connect around meaningful topics and have live and simultaneous conversations within parameters they themselves define, which will bring relevance back to their interaction with others.

3. Enabling Convergence

FriendFeed -- now both a destination and an API -- is growing rapidly, despite a miserable wiki-like interface and interactive experience. That's because people are at a loss when it comes to pulling their conversations together from various sources and assigning meaning to them. Companies that deliver beautifully designed, easy-to-use, searchable, flexible, aggregating platforms will become more important than any social media tool by itself. Deb Schultz, a San Francisco-based web strategist, compares social media to an art exhibit and says people will "curate their live presence through the web ecosystem as needed." Noovo and Zannel are examples of early attempts to enable this.

4. Building a Truly Cross-Platform Experience

The iPhone experience has changed the playing field for users, companies, and developers. In Q1 of 2009 alone, Apple sold 4.4 million iPhones, and Google's Android and the new Palm continue to build on the cross-platform, application- and service-driven model. In the new landscape of social media, people are seeking solutions that seamlessly cut across mobile, web, and live interaction, hopping on and off them like double-decker buses, all with the same pass.

5. Creating Relevant Social Networks

People will create, join, and seek social networks that enable them to have meaningful and relevant experiences with each other. They will measure their return on investment (time spent, level of disclosure, etc.) in replies, comments, their ability to influence, and the value of their learning. Rachel Masters, VP of Strategic Relationships at Ning -- a social network that grew a massive 388% in 2008 -- says, "the Internet is confusing because it can be used to replicate almost any previous medium. Ning addresses this by delivering social networks that allow people to connect around the things they love."

6. Innovating in the Advertising Space

Ad publishers and the attached ecosystem will continue to lose revenue until they realign their understanding of what appeals to people who are conversing, connecting, and expressing. The next phase of social media is a gold mine of targeted niche demographics. Nuconomy, an Israeli startup, experiments in creating and delivering highly targeted, dynamic display advertising. Shahar Nechmad, Nuconomy's co-founder and CEO, says that, on average, Nucomony customers see six to nine times higher click-through rates on targeted ads than on non-targeted ones. "People do click on ads and buy things in the same session," says Nechmad. Ad agencies and publishers that are able to quickly realign their thinking and create an innovative and relevant product discovery experience will gain significant competitive advantage.

7. Helping People Organize Their "Old" Social Media Ecosystem

As aggregating platforms enter the field, people will seek to bring order to the endless bits of information available to them. Video tagging, conversation archiving, taking cloud computing to the next stage, and making search more relevant are some of the new baseline requirements. These represent a significant opportunity for companies willing to undertake this massive endeavor.

8. Connecting with the Rest of the US and the World

With some exceptions, today's active social media users are early adopters. In the next one to two years, the benefits of social media will cross the chasm and reach the mainstream, not only in the US but around the world -- especially in community-driven regions like Southeast Asia and countries like Brazil, Russia, and Germany. Companies will need to understand the explicit and implicit differences between adoption patterns in different countries and adjust their products to meet these different needs.

9. Preparing for New Social Media Jobs

It has been a harsh year for marketing firms. Companies are looking to divert marketing dollars to more targeted social media destinations. And this is just the beginning. David Spark, founder of Spark Media Solutions, says that businesses will need to go beyond paying people to Tweet or put up a Facebook page. Social media's new job descriptions will call on subject-matter experts who can plan for relevant interaction within networks and aggregating platforms and bring together products, services, and people.

10. Making Money

The next phase of social media will bring plenty of lucrative opportunities. With the rise of aggregating platforms, social networks, and new mobile and location-based features, we're bound to see an increase in targeted and personalized ads, "freemium" packaging, revenue sharing between strategic partners, and a flow from the offline world to online social engagement (such as when real goods complement virtual ones).

Social media has forever changed the way people use technology to interact with others, but it can no longer satisfy people's needs in its current form and must change course.

The new form of social media will be about creating "whole products" and complete experiences, all in real time, across the web, mobile, and live. Each user will be able to create his or her own experience using tools, features, and apps that magically coalesce. People will be able to move seamlessly through information that is available to them anywhere, anytime, sharing rich content with a rich set of groups and networks that they themselves define. Innovative companies that are able to listen to these needs and deliver products based on them will not only survive but thrive in the coming months and years as people eagerly advance on the inviting waters of the new social alchemy.