These really are early days for social media.
Two or three years ago, few people in business would have considered using Facebook or Twitter in their marketing mix.
Now, with a downwind from a posse of self-styled gurus, everyone feels obliged to dip their toe in the water.
The question that still remains unanswered, especially in business-to-business quarters, is whether the whole thing works.
In other words, is social media cost-effective enough to make it a worthwhile long-term investment? It's certainly true that when social media is handled right - and there's a commitment from the top to make it work - it will create additional interest in a brand, service, product or company.
In the online world, this translates into extra traffic to your blog or website.
In the offline world, the hope is that it will also lead to additional sales.
For many sceptics, here is the rub.
On the surface, everything looks great - lots of posts and articles, all of which are inter-linked and then linked back to the focus of your business online, be that a website, blog - or both.
But is all this activity a substitute for 'real' selling, where persuasive messages are used in an explicit way to ask for the sale? Social media is something of a polite dance around the issue of how to prise the cash out of a prospect's wallet.
Yes, it's vulgar, this selling business.
Asking for ANYTHING in a direct way is something most of us have been conditioned to sublimate in a fog of 'benefits' and 'value'.
The fact that we all have needs for certain products or services seems irrelevant in the social media world, even where limited demand for these needs will ultimately be rewarded by commercial oblivion in the harsh equations of the capitalist system.
Where this brave new world seems to be heading is full circle and back up its own cul de sac - painful as that may sound.
It's all supposed to be about building online 'relationships', the better to pounce when your subject has been softened up sufficiently with enough pseudo-social exchanges.
There are of course lots of other reasons why buyers buy, but the conventional wisdom is that social media will pave the way in pre-disposing your prospect to at least considering your wares.
The state of play right now is similar to the developed world's stance on manufacturing.
Let the Third World get their hands dirty while we provide added value and thought leadership.
We're already beginning to see the catastrophic effects of this effete middle-class approach to life in the shape of Chinese world dominance.
In the microcosm of social media, the danger is that business will abdicate its responsibility to 'sell' - and thereby prove that what is being produced is meeting a market need - only to be found out a few years down the line with seriously dented sales figures! There's another danger that social media is creating a hallucinatory effect in the so-called sophisticated economies.
So many people are so busy with activities that are peripheral to the main event of capitalism - providing things for which 'significant' numbers of people are willing to pay - that we cannot see beyond our noses.
The fug created by social media blinds us to what everyone is trying to achieve.
In the short term, there will be a merry-go-round of cash circulating around 'professional', 'consultancy' and other middle-class services.
Of course, the argument has it that this is all part of the Information Age where 'people like us' don't soil our hands with dirty labour - let alone vulgar selling.
We're adding value, remember? How much value social media will bring to real lives remains to be seen.
Right now, there are stirrings that all is not well with this fashionable, passive world; that rude awakenings may be just around the corner.