Better late then never, but 5 years late?

Social Media Will Change Your Business
Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up…or catch you later.

Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they’re simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they’re going to shake up just about every business—including yours. It doesn’t matter whether you’re shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They’re a prerequisite. (And yes, that goes for us, too.)

Wait for it…

A prediction: Mainstream media companies will master blogs as an advertising tool and take over vast commercial stretches of the blogosphere. Over the next five years, this could well divide winners and losers in media. And in the process, mainstream media will start to look more and more like—you guessed it—blogs. Clay Shirky, a Web expert at New York University, calls it “an absorption process where the thing doing the absorbing changes.”

If you have 15 minutes, read the full article. If you don’t, just understand this. Your successful online marketing = Social Media.

Update, this needs a graph to illustrate why this businessweek article is 5 years too late. We are now about dead middle of the red adoption curve.. relevancy is bottoming out soon as the medium is taken over by said corporate entities mentioned in businessweek article.