Social Media is a blast. If you’re a social butterfly, which many of us are, you will find social media to be fun and a challenge, almost a game. I have happily played in the pool of social media for about 18 months now and have been making my living consulting in social media marketing for about six months. The applications to my two fortes, recruiting/HR and marketing are endless, allowing me to weave this incredibly fun, incredibly easy way of communicating into my tried and true strategies from B.T. (before Twitter).

But as Jeremiah O plainly states in his recent Forrester Report, the game is OVER. It’s time to get serious about the effects these applications will have. Yes, it’s nice to have a transparent and witty consultant on your side, but if said consultant can’t prove the numbers, the laughter may start to die down.

Even as mainstream comedians mock it (yes, you Jon Stewart) governments, big business and yes, even our mothers are jumping into it. While it’s not mainstream yet (a recent tweet stated, if you still have to explain it, it’s not mainstream) and it hasn’t jumped the shark as snarksters are quick to proclaim, social or new media is now being taken a bit more seriously. This university will soon offer a Masters’ in the subject.

I recently gave a speech where I tried to articulate all the Twitter vocab, including such words as “retweet” “tweeted” “twellow” “twitpic” and the like. I casually remarked that if Twitter wanted us to take them seriously, they should have a more serious name and just as quickly realized that Google probably sounded very stupid when it first came out. Now it’s a verb, “Just Google it”. My 2 year old knows what Google is. My 7 year old knows what Twitter is. My 9 year old wants an account.

The truth is we’re putting new words into the vocabulary now. People are discovering ways to apply the technology and manipulate the data to find out what they want to know quickly and efficiently. People are doing business, bypassing email, raising awareness, raising money and advertising their wares.

There are still a lot of mistakes being made, but then the same can be said for direct email and banner ads, both of which have been around for a while. So how do we get people to take this phenomenon seriously?

1) Realize it’s not a silver bullet. Communications is shifting, even the most unplugged can see that. But that doesn’t have to mean that a social media tool comes in to replace every other marketing or recruiting tool we now hold dear. If you’re bad at your job now, all social media will do is let more people know that and…faster.

2) Do your job. I have found that unless you are paid and paid well by an employer to discover as much as you can about something, you should integrate social media into your current position. The best way to do this is by finding the function. Once you find the function of a tool in your current job, you can easily identify, via research the social media tool which can accelerate or transform that function.

3) Don’t sell it. I have not been doing this as long as some, but I have been doing it long enough to know that the results of social media sell themselves to those who are willing. Those who are not will not adapt easily nor will they understand the slowly emerging code of conduct that dictates social media strategy and actions.

4) Don’t embarrass me. You know who you are. You call yourself a social media guru yet no one knows what you’re up to. You say you are a new media maven, yet you recommend facebook for every client. If you want to work in this field, get to know the tools on YOURSELF first, try them out for your business and figure out how they work before mass-slapping them onto unsuspecting and frankly, hungry clients. Figure it out before hanging up your shingle.

Because this is no game.