Apologies all, for the long hiatus. This has happened to me before — the demands of my business pull me away from my blogging. But the demands were especially heavy last year. Hope I can blog more in 2010. But in the meantime, I can share with you on this first day of the year where I think things are going. Not just in my business, but in the corporate communications industry in general. Things are really beginning to get interesting.

It’s no longer just about social technology. Actually, it never was, and you may have heard me say this before: “it’s not about the tools, it’s more about the rules.” But beyond the rules of engagement, the tools we are looking at today go beyond anything we would call social tech. We’re beginning to see the realization of an earlier prediction that the world of DIY would merge with the world of automation. There are clear benefits associated with this trend — with more automation comes scale — but clear pitfalls as well (privacy is just one of them). But there’s no looking back — in 2010, we will see more and more social tech merged and melded into automated tools, processes and products. And the opportunity for leaders here is to embrace the trend and deal with the pitfalls, not to dismiss or — worse — ignore them.

It’s no longer just about sociability, but social good. Many of us saw this coming, too. Makes perfect sense — in a world that increasingly is learning to apply social rules — and tools — for building business relationships, it stands to reason that social good would get some value. There were many hints that things would go this direction in the early days of Web 2.0 marketing — think of all the campaigns — continuing today — premised on the strategy that they would contribute to the benefit of “causes.” But there’s more hear than meets the eye. The digitization of our world has facilitated an easy convergence of interests among businesses, NGOs and government entities who now see the opportunity to collaborate on digital projects. A nice example of this is the Copenhagen Wheel (full disclosure: my business partner Peter Hirshberg helped to socialize the Wheel at the recent Copenhagen Climate talks), a concept for an electric/”hybrid” bicycle product where the social data can be aggregated for all sorts of applications with civic benefits. And notice how it also illustrates the phenomenon of “social meets automation,” the first trend that I mention in this piece. The sensor technology in the wheel hub enables the biker to share data in ways that would be impossible — if not just unsafe — otherwise.

It’s still about communication — and very much so. I had a great talk with a peer in my industry just yesterday (the last day of the year), where we both confessed that the thing we were getting hired to do was to help businesses to better communicate, a skillset learned well before the communications got digital, social, or automated. It’s still very much in demand, and the smartest companies are hiring for it. I say this not just to gear up personally for the New Year, but also to rally my peers to look at how their skills might be better applied in a world that has the potential to become more “senseable,” in the sense of the word intentionally misspelled by the MIT Senseable City Lab, the sponsor of the Copenhagen Wheel. It’s a world where commercial and non-commercial interests will learn to collaborate better, not just because it’s good for businesses to do so, but because it is good business. It’s a world where leaders will learn to use automation not just for scale but to do the things humans can’t do, and for their benefit. And, uh-huh, it’s a world where things like vision, communication, and thought leadership matter — from the trenches where many interesting campaigns are being crowdsourced, to the leadership teams at both established and ad hoc organizations. Don’t know about you, but I’m excited, because the opportunity for us all is to create a more senseable world — a place more responsive to human needs. And I believe the opportunity will present itself to us in 2010.

Happy New Year!