My Brit pal and partner in "crime," Peter van der Sluijs just did a brief post on whether "old web is dying." His post was actually referencing a similar piece by his social media consultant Brendan Cooper waxing wistful over the death of the freewheeling (and free) social web.

There have been several much more hyperbolic articles on this over the past few months (and I've been waiting for the right push. This was it.) about how Google and Facebook are doomed; about the corporational takeover of the web; about how it's all falling apart, blah, blah, blah. It was actually nice to read a couple of reasonable view about how things are changing. I especially liked Peter's pithy assessment:

"It’s easy to hyperventilate about the next big thing and whether or not Blogs / Twitter / Facebook are too yesterday for words. If you do that, you miss the big picture."

That, in a nutshell, has been the problem with most social web approaches. The frustration about the web for too many marketers and communicators is that it doesn't seem to return the same kind of results as traditional mass marketing. They want hundreds of thousands of new customers to buy their stuff. In some cases, when the company pours a bunch of money into a full fledged marketing program, they do get results. The promise of the social web, however, was that it would cost much, if anything to get the kind of results a million-dollar ad campaign would get.

The problem is -- and I keep saying this -- is that the social web is not a mass marketing platform. Some people get lots of readers on their blogs. Those people are actually really good communicators that have an expertise in an area that a lot of people care about. But if you don't get the same kind of following that Robert Scoble gets it doesn't mean blogging is dead. It means either you don't write well and/or you are writing about something that not a lot of people care about. It can also mean that the few people that read what you write don't know how or don't like to share content.

The social web is, primarily, a tool to reach people that matter in your world with information that matters to them. If you don't know what matters to them, you are not going to be successful. That applies not just to blogging but to Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+, Pinterest and every other platform. There are people and companies out there being very successful with all of the "old web" stuff. There just aren't that many. That so many are unsuccessful is not an indication that the social web has failed.

To do it right requires getting out of your comfort zone and letting other people talk about you, then listening to what they say and making adjustments as necessary.

Here's an example of an experiment I did in blogging. I built a free site to write about local politics. I sent a link to three or four influential people who started following what I wrote. They, in turn told a few others. Within a year I had 12 regular readers.

Big deal, you say? The readers included three members of the city council, two county supervisors, 4 senior executives of major corporations in town and my original group. At the end of that first year, I would regularly get invited to functions that I've never been invited to and the movers and shakers in town started asking my opinion on policy. Last year, I was asked to move my blog to a media site and was recently told that my posts are one of the most read and most engaged sections of the site.

I have never tried to get a large audience because my experiment was not about "how many" but "who". That's a big part of the big picture Peter was talking about. Engagement and dialog with the right people the keys to successful social media. Whether Google and Facebook survive is absolutely irrelevant. You can be successful with any platform as long as you keep that im mind.

This post was going to focus, primarily on Dehood, but since writing part two of this series, I fell into a new world of the Social Web companies from all over the world and I have discovered they fall mostly into 5 buckets:

sharing stuff

rating stuff

measuring stuff

organizing stuff

selling stuff

All of that is great for marketers. The more people participate in all of that stuff, the more information marketers have on the participants, so it's easy to sell stuff, which is the biggest part of the Social Web. That's where it leaves a lot of people out of participation because there is so much emphasis on the latter, that the rest seems to be rather manipulative.

That's a big problem because the whole point of the web, in the first place, is to bring people together and the social movement has been co-opted by the sales departments of the corporate world. If you pay attention to the big players in the Social Web industry -- Facebook, Twitter... and everyone else -- you will notice that in the beginning, making money was not the primary driver. The passion was about doing something new; about communicating with your local community. Facebook started out as a way for Harvard students to connect in meaningful ways (well, at least as an easy way to hook up on the weekends) and then expanded to Boston-area colleges, then colleges nationwide, etc. Twitter launched as a means of helping people attending SXSW connect and communicate at the event. Selling stuff and meeting complete strangers in distant lands was secondary.

Now, however, when a social web company launches, they want to go big, right away. The VCs push them for that. The press clamors for it. And when you go to social web events (and I've been to three in the past month) that's what everyone talks about... well, almost.

There is that pesky location-based service issue, which is what I started writing about. Some of these services, like Foursquare, have fallen into the social web hype maelstrom and are trying to be as big as Facebook right away, but their value proposition is not about building community, but about the first and fifth buckets. In the process, they also do some of the other three. And after you have become the mayor of several places and spent all your disposable income, there is not much left. People who are status addicts are still entranced by the game, but when you get out into the streets, you find something different altogether.

I am involved in international business. I have relationships with people I have never physically met but enjoy rousing conversations with them on many subjects, all through social media. But I'm involved in my local community and my neighborhood. I actually know and am close to several neighbors. And when I shop, the first place I look is local. That's what it means to be in a community, and that's where the Social Web comes up wanting for the larger market.

In the past year, I have been able to show many people and businesses how to use social media to expand their local presence, but in every case, I have to show them how to jury rig currently available social media to make it work for them. Over the past few weeks, however, I have found a sixth bucket of the Social Web that is trying and succeeding in focusing their product to build real relationships around you, not virtual relationships online; companies that are putting the Social Web in the hands of the rest of us.

I interviewed some of these companies at TechCrunch Disrupt a few weeks ago and a few I got on video. What makes them stand out to me is that they are making applications that can be important for many of the people on the top of the adoption bell curve to see the value in this mobile based economy.

That last point is what is so very important for all of us. Right now smart phones are all the rage. It seems sometimes that the entire world is snapping up iPhones, iPads and Android phones. The reality is, actually, they are not. With all the hype about this stuff, smart phones have yet to jump the chasm into mainstream adoption. Even iPhone sales have penetrated less than 6 percent of the available market. That's because the benefit of the technology is the ability to use apps and there is no compelling reason to use apps yet, other then they are cool and attractive to early adopters.

This new bucket of Social Web companies is approaching specifically the section of the market that just can't see the value in smart phones. How they are doing it will be very profitable, but at the same time, very altruistic.

And that's what we are going to look at next.