During these uncertain economic times, action needs to be taken. It’s no point just sitting on the sidelines waiting to see what will happen. The world continues no matter what.

This is just the beginning for a rapidly changing landscape where the media content environment rows more fractious and the user gains more control and power.

Traditional, established content providers will have to adapt and develop new business and monetization models in order to keep revenue streams flowing. The key to success will be identifying few forms of content that can complement their traditional strengths. The new landscape offers opportunities as well as challenges.

Early adopters (“Revolutionaries”) are more advanced in their understanding and execution of social media marketing initiatives than more cautious marketers (“Wait-and-Sees”). Nearly five times as many Revolutionaries are already implementing social media in their organizations and three times as many Wait-and-See companies are only at the learning stage.

Ben Parr of Mashable sums it up pretty well: Social media used to be Web 2.0 and social networking, but now we have moved on to a broader term that encompasses not only social networking, but blogs, podcasts, user-generated content, social bookmarking, microblogging, and lifestreams. The rise of all these forms of new media has also created demand for people who can help companies position and market themselves within this new realm. Social media allows people to spread their message to hundreds, if not thousands, of friends, followers, and strangers. Some companies can only dream of that kind of reach, while others pay millions in advertising for the same effect.

I was giving a White Paper from AT&T by Owen, which has some interesting observations about how corporations will be impacted and how they will make the most of the web 2.0 opportunities?

1. Corporations Will Change the Way They Communicate

Social Networking is bringing a broad new range of technology innovations to communications: multimedia, presence, interactivity, etc… Now, customers are not only looking for the value of the products, but for corporate values that make sense. Being visible and personalizing communication are the silver bullets, even for B2B businesses, as well as the need to let go of some of their image control.

2. Corporations Will Change Their Vision

As businesses become more transparent thanks to the increasing volume of information available online, employees will rely more on the enterprise culture, and search for it if it is not explicit enough. In parallel, stakeholders will seek proof of corporate social responsibility awareness, made inevitable by the growing transparency. Eventually, corporations will define their “unified collaboration and communication” strategy at the highest level – the vision.

3. Corporations Will Change Their Organization

Many businesses debate how they can flatten the pyramid, to gain the benefits of startups with their associated adaptability and fast growth models. Most will see very different consequences and roles and responsibility mutations as a result of Social Networking: managers will need to adapt and become Social Networking evangelists; knowledge management professionals will become the architects of this evolution if it is controlled at all; and the IT group will need to work much more closely with Knowledge Managers and users to enable the new applications.

4. Collective Intelligence and Customer Experience Will Lead Innovation

Many different ways to innovate are being piloted in 2008, all of which include collective thinking, most often through contests, but also via a regular process of gathering together employees, customers and partners from the value chain. With product lifecycles getting shorter, the enterprise needs to capitalize on those relationships and anticipate customer needs. Hence, making the most of collective innovation is still a fumbling process that has to be formalized.

5. Networking Will Be Key to Employee Excellence

People think more globally as their contacts become increasingly international; they pay attention to what their online contacts mention, and use social network features to gain greater depth of knowledge in their areas of interest. In this way, they have access to multiple advisors and mentors, in addition to the raw information; hence Social Networking is a true self development tool that can be used at any time, including from a mobile terminal like a BlackBerry or iPhone.

The full white paper can be downloaded here