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I bit my tongue. Who was talking about Facebook or Twitter Inc. ?

One of the biggest problems in social media in the enterprise? There is too much focus on media and not enough on social.

Social media -- and social networking -- is not about the tools. It's about leveraging the power and attraction of the basic human need for social interaction. It's about people engaged in interactions and conversations in their authentic voice. More than that, it's about the power of community and collaboration. When CIOs don't get that, they miss the point and the real promise of social networking.

Why should a CIO care? I have long said that the real source of competitive advantage in the future will stem from an organization's ability to rapidly assemble, disassemble, and reassemble high-performance teams. Collaboration and community will replace rigid structures.

Facilitating that kind of agility is the real promise of social media. And we're missing it.

I'm getting ready to talk to a supply chain conference about social media and cloud computing. The audience has great personal interest, but struggles to see how social media can address real business problems. No one questions the need for greater collaboration and communication in the enterprise -- we know that we have to knock down silos -- but CIOs confused by the consumer hype surrounding Twitter and Facebook don't see social media as the way to do that in a business environment.

The result? Serious penetration of social networking in the corporate world is happening more slowly than it should.

Want proof? A recent Forrester Research Inc. report -- "The CIO's Guide to Creating a Social Media Policy" -- contained a statistic that amazed me: Fifty-four percent of organizations didn't have a social media policy or didn't know if one existed. A further 26 percent were taking what I call the Nancy Reagan approach -- "Just say no." Put 'em together and that's a whopping 80 percent!

Companies are structured beasts. If they are using something as a serious corporate tool, they're going to have a policy about it. Is the incessant publicity for consumer social media encouraging CIOs to treat the technology as nothing more than a small set of distinctly un-businesslike tools? Toys, really. Not worth engaging with. That can be the difference between experimenting with social media and making it an integral part of how a company operates.

The need for enterprise collaboration has never been greater. We know that building resilient companies requires us to break down silos and form collaborative relationships inside and outside our organizations.

But how? Many companies still use email as their main collaborative platform. Email may be ubiquitous, but it is a disaster as a collaborative platform. Clearly we need some new approaches -- and they are out there. From Wikis to discussion boards to internal blogs to emerging enterprise collaboration tools like MindTouch. And a wide variety of large and small vendors is working on creating new alternatives.

But meaningful, widespread adoption of these enterprise-friendly social media techniques won't happen unless CIOs understand what social media really is and see it as worthy of investigation.

In another Forrester report -- "Enterprise Social Networking 2010 Market Overview" -- the researcher predicts that 2010 will be a defining year for social media. I'll settle for just a more accurate definition -- one that lets us see the real promise of social media in the enterprise.