Money
The business model
If you saw Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter on the Colbert Report recently, you heard him say that Twitter was still trying to work out the business model. If I can paraphrase, he said something like, "right now we are focused on value creation, the next step is monetization" or something like that. This echoes the "pre-bubble bust" talk we heard in 2000 with word like "give it away and grow rich".
Ways in which social media/social networking has been effectively used commercially:
1. Customer communities who support each other and reduce the support costs for the company. Examples of this include this article with the section on PMI Group and Intuit In the Intuit story, the point of these networks is clear in the quote "In fact, the company says that volunteers answer 70 percent of all support questions, taking an enormous load off customer service employees."