It's not social media, it's social me.

Some days, my Twitter feed seems like nothing more than narcissism. And Facebook, MySpace, YouTube – even the names seem designed to inflate egos. As for blogs, the typical post can be conveniently summarized thus:

Me me me me. Me me me me. Me me, me me me me me me me me. Me me me – me me me me me. Me me me me. Me me me me. Me.

For all the talk, all the conversations, all the to and fro, is anyone really listening?

This all came to mind one night, working late. I happened to look at the Twitter feed of a self-professed Famous Social Media Guru, a man who actually claims “inventions” in the field and runs a successful business telling people that unless they engage with social media right this second their brand, their careers, and possibly the world will all come to a sticky end. His Twitter feed is a relentless stream of self-promotion, self-aggrandizement and unalloyed self-congratulation. He claims to follow over 2,500 people on Twitter, an impossible task and a transparent technique to amass as many of his own followers as possible. His heavily trafficked blog is an unaccompanied Variation On A Theme Of Me, with occasional intermissions in which he pays tribute to other Gurus in a virtuous cycle of ebullient backslapping. He's not alone; there's a whole boatload of these characters. It makes me grind my teeth and want to go to a distant Trappist Monastery with a vow of silence and not even a dial-up connection to the Internet.

And it isn't just egos that are getting over-inflated. Today, The Wall Street Journal reported that investors are bidding up Internet and social media startups to levels reminiscent of the last Dot-Com boom. As straight-up, lets-make-money businesses, you have to wonder about the prospects of these social media outfits. We are, to paraphrase Gartner Research and Charles Dickens, at the peak of inflated, bubble-bursting, Great Expectations.

But wait. Might we be throwing out the proverbial baby here?

Can social media make business sense? For sure. In my day job, we use it very effectively to communicate with key stakeholders, and we've made major public announcement over our blog, with great success. It gives us transparent access to our customers, partners and fellow workers, and we get direct, fast, and unvarnished feedback in a way that was impossible with other media.

Can we link social media to real business outcomes that matter – say increased profits, happier customers, or lower overhead? Anecdotally yes, but we've still a long way to go. And lets face it, anecdotes don't count. This is why I remain convinced that measurement is the problem to crack. Measure the right things, and the right result will follow. In the meantime, see you at the monastery.

Social Media Makes Money?

A lot of people, including me, have made fretful bleating noises about the dismal economics of conventional media. Not so many have made the same bleats about social media, even though these businesses aren't exactly printing cash.

Just today the Wall Street Journal reported that YouTube owner's Google are “aggressively pushing new ad formats and ramping up deals with media companies” in an attempt to make some money from the popular video site. Google acquired YouTube over three years ago and has struggled to make it pay.

Google isn't alone. In 2005 News Corp. bought MySpace for $580 million, only to see the site's popularity wain as Facebook adoption exploded. Earlier this month News Corp. announced a quarterly loss of $205M, citing MySpace as a big cost-sink. Not that rival Facebook is exactly rolling in cash itself – the company hopes to get cash-flow positive by 2010, even as the number of subscribers spirals above 250 million. In March this year Facebook let go of its CFO, and in May sold stock at an evaluation well below the price Microsoft took when it bought into the company back in 2007. Meanwhile, the social media darling Twitter is enjoying a kind of celebrity and ubiquity that seems to eclipse even famous users Obama, Kutcher, and the Iranian nation state, yet the company has essentially zero revenue and is fumbling for a business model.

This is an enviable problem to have. As more and more of our lives drift into the ether, many of these companies are becoming invaluable. Most will find a way to extract payment – directly or indirectly – from us all. The usual default model – advertising – might well work, although I remain skeptical that over the long haul this alone will be enough. And without a doubt some of the social media giants of today will wilt and disappear: People are fickle, fads change, and the very success that many social media sites enjoy will make them less appealing to users who's time and attention become stretched thinner amid all the clutter and noise.

All these services are turning the Internet into a modern-day Babel. The real money may be in technologies that keep all this information at bay, and offer ways to filter, find, manage, and assimilate content, or mechanisms for presenting and preserving our digital indentities in a coherent and controlled way. We need protection. Social media services may not charge a dollar but they ain't free -- they cost us all way too much time.