A groundbreaking study by Eric Mattson and Nora Barnes from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, shows that contrary to popular opinion, “The social media revolution is coming to the business world.”

“Initial signs of corporate investment in social media can be seen in Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube and News Corp’s $580 million purchase of Intermix Media (parent company of MySpace.com).” But these acquisitions were expected. What this study intends to find is if “the hype is real,” by looking at the Inc. 500, “an elite group of the fastest-growing companies within the United States.”

I had an opportunity to talk to Eric Mattson to discuss the study and ask him some questions about social media.

Muhammad Saleem: You mention that according to previous research, only 8 percent of the Fortune 500 currently have a public blog. Do you generally find business to be slow adopters (or afraid) when it comes to technology?

When the German online newspaper Netzeitung announced the launch of a new citizen journalism project, a message posted on its home page was, well, ambitious: “Wanted: 20 million editors.”

The Readers Edition, as it was named, did not quite live up to its goal. Currently, there are about 400 regular authors and around five to eight articles are posted each day. After its launch in June 2006, it was up to 40 or 50. Readers Edition wanted to be the first German online newspaper without a copy editor. Another interesting goal.

With Germany’s biggest online presence, Spiegel Online making money, German publishers have figured out that the Web is here to stay. But citizen journalism has been slow to catch on and some of the hesitancy may be cultural.

“Germany’s civil society is not very familiar with the idea of one feeling entitled to publicly articulate himself,” said Christoph Neuberger, from the university of Muenster, “and journalism in Germany is always reproached with seeing its audience more like objects of influence than as responsible individuals that just want to inform themselves.”

Hugo Martin, a veteran of print- and online-publishing is leading the re-launch of Readers Edition in several months and has his own views on what happened: “In my opinion, it was a fault to build it so much around the community of bloggers.”

Last December, Netzeitung’s editor-in-chief Michael Maier quit his job of six years, to buy the Readers Edition from its mother company. He founded a new company named “Blogform GmbH” to concentrate on citizen journalism, which he sees as the future of media (he coined the “20 million editors” slogan). His moves gathered attention from media-observers and publishers.

Maier and Martin are both looking to make the Readers Edition something different, even something more than a citizen online paper. “We want the Readers Edition and its readers to get involved. We want to be action-oriented. And we don’t have to and don’t want to be politically correct,” claims Martin.