I have this friend who is the ultimate pragmatist. He (initials DS) shall remain nameless, but his tendency to scoff at anything remotely resembling hype, I’ve found, is a somewhat universal trait, especially among engineers and technologists. So, of course, the minute I mentioned blogging, Second Life, Facebook, Twitter, or FriendFeed he immediately wanted me to skip my tendency to lobby him like a typical marketer or sales person and get right to the business case. “What’s in it for me as a person,” he wanted to know, “and what’s in it for my company?”

To tell you the truth when he asked me that I stumbled, I stammered, and I struggled to quantify the returns businesses might see from their investments in blogging, communities, and other tools to engage their customers and their community-at-large. And this was awkward because I loathe being tongue-tied!

Now that I’ve spent several months in the trenches actually managing communities, making mistakes, and watching nearly every single one of our community engagement statistics rise  month over month (like registered users, site visits, posts, content contributed by community rather than corporate, etc.) I feel like I have a more realistic perspective on things. I haven’t just drank the glass of koolaid, I’ve guzzled the entire pitcher.

But let’s be frank. Social media tools and concepts have hardly enjoyed mass adoption. I know it’s difficult to believe for those of us who follow the Twitter ticker all day, but think about it: are your neighbors blogging? Are your parents Twittering? Even your colleagues, are they plugged into the social media super highway like you are?

I think one of the problems we face as we try to encourage more people around us to adopt social media tools and concepts is that there is so little evidence out there to indicate why it’s a good investment of people’s time or their companies’ money. And unlike the onset of the original internet boom, today we’ve no shortage of consultants and pundits who claim to have found the social media holy grail. And because they (and you and I) are everywhere blogging, Tweeting, and talking about how great it is, the industry is in danger of suffering from social media hype overload. I might go so far as to claim we’re teetering on the edge of creating the same type of internet bubble that previously burst after the hype-dust settled before.

But wait, there is a cure. Let’s stop talking so much about social media and start doing it. And be sure that while we’re doing, let’s document our successes, failures, data, metrics, traffic, numbers–anything we can to learn more about what is working and what isn’t. Then return and share our experiences. We could share how, to our utter shock and delight, downloads of that totally nerdy and (in our opinion) boring video grew steadily month after month simply by organic search traffic. Or we could tell how we tried to create a community for an event and not one single person–from inside our company or externally–contributed any content or joined any discussions. [both of these are true stories].

In the end it is only by seeing or experiencing results first hand that will inspire people to change their current habits, and companies to modify their existing understanding of how to engage their customers through the new tools and concepts avaible to them through the groundswell. But if we help them do, then the bubble will still be bouncing along. And hopefully we’ll still be riding on top.