Gartner has recently released its analysis of social media, with five predictions for where it is headed (see “Gartner Reveals Five Social Software Predictions for 2010 and Beyond”)—predictions that have implications for both organizational management and for marketing strategy in our field:

1. By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.
2. By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration.
3. Through 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail.
4. Within five years, 70 percent of collaboration and communications applications designed on PCs will be modeled after user experience lessons from smartphone collaboration applications.
5. Through 2015, only 25 percent of enterprises will routinely utilize social network analysis to improve performance and productivity.

My takeaways of the management implications of these developments:

1. Your organization will need social media presence (however limited) to be included in all of the business networking discussions in your market space.
2. In planning your organization's use of social media, it's important to focus on the solution and not the technology. Executives will need to press tech departments into accepting a solution-based approach to their work—and participating in the evolution of social media's role in your organization.
3. The smart phone user interface will soon become our standard computer interface—it's not just the hardware that is merging.
4. Process analysis in your organization will need to include the social media-based interactions between team members and with customers.

Stay tuned for more coverage on the social media impact on the health and human service field.

I recently presented at a state behavioral health association meeting where, to put it mildly, the execs in the audience thought my five-year projections were a bit 'wild'. I heard many comments like, "That will happen eventually, but certainly not in five years…"

But even my view of the future of the health and human services field was given a 'big shock' by the remarks of Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando. Mr. Schmidt was asked to answer the question, "What will the Internet look like five years from now?" Here are a few of the trends he is working into the five-year strategic plan for Google:

• The next five years will outstrip the factor of ten that we now know as Moore's Law—computers’ capabilities will be doubled (speed, storage, reduced cost, etc.) in five years—and not ten
• Within five years, there will be widespread broadband access well above 100MB in performance—in other words, super-fast bandwidth for real time audio and video communication
• Distinctions between TV, radio, and the web will go away—facilitated in part by inexpensive, fast broadband access
• Real time user-generated information on the web will increase—also facilitated by inexpensive fast broadband access—and the will be including it in search results, and more critical, in ranking
• Web users will expect to jump from one application to another seamlessly (much like today's teenagers)—and will demand applications that permit this
• Five years from now the Internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.

What does it all mean for our field? I don't know yet, but our team at OPEN MINDS is working on the answer to that very question. Stay tuned.