I was listening to a podcast of Kris Smith interviewing Chris Brogan, Chris Heuer and Chris Messina at the recent South by Southwest event. Hey, that's a lot of Chris's (stay tuned for the "Chris Conference").

One of the more significant statements to me was in the opening of the podcast when one of the Chris's said the fragmentation of social media is starting to wear on people. Other than companies trying to catch the "video boat," businesses are really beginning to look for aggregation tools that leverage the many social media web applications and properties.

This couldn't be truer. And although more aggregation tools keep popping up, they are not keeping up with the formation rate of social networks and communities (whether they consist of 30 people or 300,000). Can they ever?

For social media marketers, this is good news. But it also brings on new challenges because staying on the bleeding edge of online marketing means you are the pioneer when it comes to determining which efforts are relevant and impactful to your client. 

You can keep up with what many of the experts are saying, but must ultimately take action yourself (and learn from it). We must also keep in mind that the fragmentation of social media certainly isn't limited to the tools. Afterall, it's really about the people.