What is the Social Impact of Social – specifically, is all of the time and attention we are increasingly devoting to social media efforts a force for good? Or not so good? Are they good for us as selfish individuals, promoting our personal brands? Or is there a larger collective good we are creating as we spend more time crafting and weaving our network of relationships online?

What is the ROI of Social Media – of course we can measure the ROI of social media, and I will outline this in my next post. We can measure the ROI of anything, even putting your pants on in the morning, because both the time a company spends on social media, and the decision of a person to wear or not wear pants, has a financial impact on the financial well being of the parties involved.

The underlying dynamic I’m investigating here is how large media-spending brands will start to value social media, and how this will impact, shape, and change the  experiences of humans on mainstream and niche social networks, and how the second question affects the first.

This is a rare occasion in business to watch the funding and ongoing growth of “pre business model” services. The last time was Web 1.0, but having lived in the eye of the storm for both 1.0 and now 2.0, social seems to have more legs, because social tends to deliver on the 1.0 promise – sticky sticky eyeballs, fixed on a screen.