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When you are recovering from an operation on your neck, you really only have two options for passing the time: escapist entertainment on the iPad and staring out the window.

During the past few weeks, I’ve spent countless hours doing both – each of which has proven to be, in their own way, rather enlightening.

The former consisted of me rather obsessively catching up on the X-men. In addition to learning about all sorts of cool, lesser known mutants (Hello, Domino!), it got me thinking about the concept of evolution – how it happens, why it happens, how people react to it, and how it can and cannot be controlled.

And all that evolution thinking reminded me of social media…and the fact that if I write one more blog post that contains a dippy segue line in it like, “and that reminded me of social media,” I’m going to jam a fork in my eye.

The evolution of the revolution.

You know something's got to change when you come home from the hospital after a big operation and one of your first thoughts is, “W00t!! I'm not going to have to blog for a few weeks!”

While some of that can be chalked up to me not being a very enthusiastic blogger, my larger realization was that I am just really, really tired of talking about social media all of the time.

I think it's time for the KaneCo Conversation to evolve.

Coincidentally, the whole conversation on social media is evolving right now, too. And, the big guns in this industry have been saying for some time now that there is a huge shift occurring in how we approach and communicate about this stuff.

Social media isn’t dying or dead. But it also isn’t this revolutionary new thing anymore that just exists unto itself.

People have realized that (from a business perspective, at least) social media doesn't work all that effectively in a vacuum. It needs to be integrated into those big business categories that have been around for ages – communications, PR, marketing, sales or customer service.

Firms like ours help companies with that process because we understand how these new tools work, and, have also been playing for decades with the old toolboxes to which they are being added.

We pride ourselves on being able to see this big picture, but I fear we might have grown too comfortable describing it from one small vantage point.

One step at a time...

As I was reminded from my X-men homework, evolution is a slow process.

If you wake up one morning and suddenly find that you can shoot lasers out of your fingertips, you don’t just throw on some pants and go rushing out the door to battle crime.

You need to take some time to decide how you're going to live your life now (note to self: do not point at people anymore), share this information with those around you, and refine your skills so you can put them to good use (or bad use, if you decide that you're more the super villain type).

That's also true when it comes to the evolution of social media and how Kane Consulting will be discussing it via this blog.

Our evolution needs to be a slow one. Companies hire us to do social media. Period. That is the outer skin of the communications onion they want to peel back first. They're not looking for lasers yet.

So, in our monthly e-news (you can subscribe at the bottom of our homepage) we will continue to share the hottest news on the digital space, and how social media fits into it. It's likely that you'll continue to see posts on social media on this blog, as well. But, perhaps some will focus more on the big picture and less on tools.

I’m not back to 100% yet, post-surgery, so I still have ample time to look out the window and think more about where we're headed. In the meantime though, I’d love to know your ideas…

• Are you tired of talking about social media all the time or that just us?
• If so, what kind of things do you want us to talk about instead?
• What types of posts do you like to read? More education? More observation? More stories? More thought-leadery stuff?
• Does anyone actually read this thing or should we just go take a nap? (Cause, I gotta tell you, a nap sounds really nice right now.)

Thanks, in advance, for your help. We look forward to having you join us for the evolution and seeing where the conversation takes us.