Ryan Holmes

The growing role of enterprise social media, plus the growing budgets and authority of CMOs entrusted with choosing the best platforms, translates into an exciting future for apps that harness social potential for large companies.

Not using social media in the workplace, in fact, is starting to make about as much sense as not using the phone or email.

The point is that instead of a monolithic brick of printed content - delivered more or less unchanged to all subscribers - social media offers news that is personalized and nimble.

Social media, for all of its limitations, is rarely irrelevant. The stream of updates on your Facebook page, for instance, is algorithmically engineered to be darn-near irresistible.

Working with lots of old media clients, I've had a front-row seat on the ascension of new social players and the decline of traditional news outlets. And it's clear to me that old media has an awful lot to learn from social media, in particular in five key areas: relevance, distribution, velocity, monetization, and user experience.

It may be coincidence that the decline of newspapers has corresponded with the rise of social media. Or maybe not.

I'd like to think my company HootSuite is anything but a stodgy old-boys' club. As a social media company, our employees are by and large young, progressive and open-minded.

During the early days of HootSuite, when social media was still seen as a fad, I made the decision to treat our funding as if it were my personal bank account. That's not to say I blew it on fast cars and fancy dinners. Exactly the opposite.

Social media listening tools make it easy to track brand references and mentions, and these functions can still be handled ably by a small, dedicated team.

No surprise that, as companies have adopted social media en masse, demand for software and applications to manage and monitor social use has exploded.

From its humble origins in college dorm rooms, social media has quietly crept into the boardroom.

LinkedIn and Flickr, among other sites, have already proven freemium can generate revenue in the social media context.