Remember when the Net roared on the scene and created new business models not even imaginable before?  “Opportunities where Amazon is 34x bigger than Barnes & Noble, where NetFlix destroyed Blockbuster, and where Skype is worth $2.6B while telecom companies drop like flies?”

Jason Cohen, founder of Smart Bear Software reflects on what’s happening on the net today where, as he sees it…. and it sounds pretty reasonable to me…the same pattern is emerging, just in a different guise.

In, Why you have to engage in social media, even if you don’t want toJason talks about how social media has already changed the rules of the game. Here’s his take:

“The days of “have a website and advertise” are over. It’s too expensive to be noticed on an Internet that’s already full.

Social media is the only way LinksFor.Us could get traction. If Darren Rowse or Brian Clark talks about it, it’s visible. If it hits the front page of Digg, it’s visible. Once it’s visible, once you have things like incoming links and lots of regular traffic, then you have a shot at using traditional SEO techniques for staying visible. But social media is the only way to overcome static friction (short of spending crazy money).

Social media is already changing the rules of the marketplace, just like the web did a decade ago. It’s still early of course and no one — not even the experts — knows where all this is going. But it’s clear that times are changing again, and those that don’t jump in will go the way of print media.

Want examples?

• In a test run by BazaarVoice, Rubbermaid discovered that adding customer reviews to their website increased sales and decreased returns of their products. Skeptics said sales of low-rated products would crater. What actually happened is that sales of low-rated products increased. When shoppers were questioned, they explained that when they read why someone else maligned the product, often they disagreed or didn’t care about that particular problem. If the price was right, it was worth buying anyway.
• Fog Creek software makes millions of dollars from FogBugz, a bug-tracking system. There’s hundreds of bug-tracking systems — free, cheap, expensive, open-source, commercial — yet Fog Creek is highly visible and successful with no advertising. How? Because the founder, Joel Spolsky, has built an incredibly popular blog about writing software. He was before his time; before RSS he wrote essays and notified you by email when a new one was posted. It’s widely agreed that without the blog-before-it-was-called-a-blog, Fog Creek would likely have remained an unknown consulting company with a few struggling products.
• Nike allowed people to build and order custom shoes on their website. Skeptics said deep customization is too expensive, design-sharing is too complicated, and people need to try shoes on. Wrong! Once the site took off, Nike created physical stores where you could do the same thing.  Joaquin Hidalgo, Nike VP of Global Brand Marketing says those stores now “represent 25% of our revenue.”
• Speaking of shoes, Zappos also sells shoes on the Internet. CEO Tony Hsieh is so convinced that their legendary Twitter presence results in sales, he even wrote a popular beginner’s guide to Twitter. He insists that Twitter and other forms of open communication are required for excellent customer service; employees are trained in Twitter. Zappos raked in $1B last year even with the recession; they’re doing something right.
• Oddly-named marketing site Marketing.fm gets double the traffic of marketing.com. One has a blog with useful content and one doesn’t. Guess which is which.
• Zeus Jones describes 16 more terrific examples. (Thanks to David S. Finch for digging it up.)”

Conclusion: better jump in now while you still can and keep leveraging up with social media. Or, as Jason puts it, “Will there be another new thing someday? Sure.

But today and for the foreseeable future, this is the world. You have to jump in even if you don’t yet understand it.”