Since september, 2005 when Tim O'Reilly explained to the world what was Web2.0 we have seen a steady increase in its relevance and more and more confirmations that this is a long term trend.

So by now, we kind of take for granted that at least a certain segment of consumers is relying more and more on social (or Consumer Generated) media for their information / relationship needs.

This fast catched on with businesses and other entities alike (as I said many times, at the end of each industry there is a consumer) and nobody is now really surprised that all three best placed democratic contenders for the 2008 US presidential election (Clinton, Obama and Edwards) have chosen some form of social medium to announce their candidacy.

After more than a year of taking on the road across Europe my presentation on the Challenge of Consumer Generated Media, I feel we need now to move on, and building on the basis of what we discussed so far, look at the specific challenges and opportunities for businesses as they want to move beyond having a corporate blog.

So what are the interesting things to focus on? Well here is a initial list - some of this stuff I have written about before, some it's new, but I think it all points in a direction of social media being more and more "built in"  (as opposed to "grafted on") the marketing mix:

I: the attention economy	As we discussed elsewhere the three currencies of all things online are Information, Support and Attention; but while the first two have been around for a long time and have fueled the expansion and success of the Internet, the real discontinuity happened with the addition of Attention. Whether it's MySpace or Flick'r, most social media compete and offer attention - their trump cards being how easy they make for my original content to attract the attention of fellow members of that enormous peer community.
II: examples	SWU and GoodYear - when GoodYear hired temporary workers to replace striking union members, the SWU reacted using social media to make itself heard.
	Starbucks -
	SecondLife about itself - how do you turn a potentially nasty fights over copyright in a positive PR story, leveraging the sense of humour so characteristic of this category of people? For more on hacker's sense of humour, read Eric Raymond
	Do you use social media or are you used by them? - here Microsoft develops an Xbox ad which is never aired (a "banned" commercial) only to find its way on YouTube to then be taken as a model for a true flashmob, which again gets filmed and ends up on YouTube.
	Tech giants getting a SecondLife - why are the likes of Cisco and IBM opening shops and more in generale getting a significant presence SecondLife ? Are they seeing something that we don't? (for those with SL accounts: visit Cisco; visit IBM)
	A spanish ONG gets its message across on SL - from the very large to the very small: spanish non-profit Mensajeros de la Paz has created a SL avatar in the form of a child who bears a cardboard sign with a promotional message for the ONG
	Microsoft criticized for "tainting" Wikipedia - How do you deal with collaborative media such as Wikipedia? Is there a way to get yourself rightfully represented but avoid the media backlash should they find out (and they will) when you go at it undercover?
	CBS promotes a TV talk show - Craig Ferguson is a sweet scottish stand up comedian; his show airs every nght after Dave Letterman on CBS. I live in Italy, my satellite does not include CBS (although Dave's show is syndicated to international networks so I occasionally get it) yet I watch Ferguson about every night. How? YouTube of course !
	WalMart criticized for its fake blog - "Let's build a blog" can sometimes be interpreted as a new coat of paint to an old car. Social media are about conversations and if fiction was acceptable on websites (as it is in TV advertising) this is not necessarily so on CGM.
III: tools	All of this is made possible thanks to the pervasiveness and ease of use of two technologies that are rapidly becoming an embedded fixture of social media. Syndication and Tagging need to be understood because this understanding helps avoiding common mistakes and misconceptions in how they work and why they are different from traditional monodirectional communications
	Syndication - aggregators are fast becoming the new "home" of many advanced users. This implies that the money invested in driving traffic should maybe invested otherwise. What are the newest stars in aggregators and who are the leading contenders?
	Tagging - how long before your browser's bookmark panel is substituted by a digg or del.icio.us applet ? Tagging is a way to inject back order in the anarchy and sharing tags is a way to achieve a common understanding about what is what