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I asked Reggie Henry, CAE, CIO of ASAE: The Center for Association Leadership, to share an important theme from yesterday's Technology Conference Town Hall Meeting. He said that an important concept referred back to what Gartner Research calls the Technology Hype Cycle.

"It's really clear that although everybody thinks digital is crazy important, that social media is critically important from a strategic point of view," Henry says, "the expected benefits did not match how important they said it was."

To begin to understand why, you need to follow the link to see Gartner's Technology Hype Cycle, or at least picture this: a graph with an initial peak labeled "peak of inflated expectations," which drops to a trough labeled the "trough of disillusionment," which rises again, less steeply, through a "slope of enlightenment" to the "plateau of production."

"I've seen every technology go through that process," says Henry. "Some take longer than others to get to that plateau. They stay in that trough until people decide what they want to get out of the technology, and then they develop a strategy around it and they develop metrics to see if that strategy is successful. Where we are with digital and social media pieces is that we've decided they're important, they're really important, but we don't know what we want from them yet."