Last week’s Forrester Consumer Forum in Chicago was a giant love fest about social networking technologies and it clearly underscored how mainstream the so-called 2.0 social media industry has moved over the past few years.

An array of senior executives from major consumer brands shared their plans and visions for the future of social media, including Christie Hefner, Chairman & CEO, of Playboy Enterprises, Robert Bach, President of the Entertainment & Devices Division of Microsoft, and Christina Norman, President, MTV Networks. The massive investments being made in social technologies by these companies clearly underscores how far major brands have come in embracing new ways to wrap their arms around consumers.

Richard Edelman did his usual good job of outlining PR’s role in social media and someday in the future he may actually appear at a conference and not have to take hits for the Wal-Mart fiasco. However, that may not be soon since some people at the conference were still bringing up the 2004 Kryptonite Bic pen video. Richard is right on when he said he’d rather run an agency that is on the leading edge of where communications is headed rather than playing it safe and do nothing. The lack of PR professionals at this conference pretty much made his point.

Peter Kim moderated a panel on Brand Monitoring (a term I don’t care for, but that’s a post for another day) with representatives from Lenovo, Fiskars Brands and Nokia, who are all integrating social media insights into their day-to-day communications. In fact, most of the people I spoke to at the two-day conference believe this industry hasn’t come close to hitting its stride yet and the next five years will be a fun ride for those in the social media business. I couldn’t agree more. I’m actually starting to feel bad for companies and marketing agencies that don’t have social media strategies in place heading into 2008. Falling too far behind competitors in this space will be a lot more painful for companies than previous Internet phases when being late to the game didn’t impact their bottom line.

John Bernoff and Charlene Li handed out the Forrester Groundswell Awards and previewed some of the interesting case studies and data that will be published next spring in their new book, appropriately titled “Groundswell.” It was also great to finally meet Peter Waldheim, interim CEO of WOMMA, who is putting together a terrific agenda for the upcoming Summit in Las Vegas.

The folks at Forrester put on a great conference that was well worth attending. For more details on the event, head over to Jeremy Pepper’s site.

Mike Spataro