This is a guest post by Matt Tucker, co-founder and CTO of Jive Software.

Last week, Huddle CEO Alastair Mitchell wrote a provocative guest post positing that standalone social business software will die this year. I wanted to set the record straight on the parts he got right, but also what he got totally wrong.

The thrust of his argument is that businesses need more than just a Facebook-like activity stream for conversations where employees can talk about work. I totally agree, and also … duh.

But as we enter 2013, the move past this first wave of social business is already well under way. I think Mitchell gets a lot right about what comes next. The second wave of social business is all about delivering measurable business value. It moves beyond conversation and into action. It lets employees get work done instead of just talk about work. And instead of being driven solely by IT, it’s focused on deeper use cases aligned around specific lines of business.

This is a profound transformation. For the first time, companies doing social business the right way are measuring a massive business impact.

McKinsey & Co. last year issued the most comprehensive report on social business and the social economy previously available and found that social technology can provide a 20 to 25 percent improvement in productivity in the enterprise — that adds up to between a $900 billion and $1.3 trillion annual value.

On the heels of that report, we worked with the top global business consulting firm to investigate this further and to understand just how customers are getting value from social platforms, measured by hard ROI metrics.

Even we at Jive were surprised by the results. We found that companies using the Jive platform showed an increase of 15 percent in worker productivity and a 2 to 4 percent increase in topline revenue due to major reductions in time looking for information, fewer meetings, and less email. That’s business value, and those are the type of metrics that every company should demand out of its social business platform.

Standalone social business platforms, when done right, create a powerful social layer that provides the contextual webbing between all enterprise systems, connecting people with expertise and people with information — no matter what app they’re currently using. By giving workers what they need when they need it, they can make decisions faster and be more productive.

Social for social’s sake is dead. Facebook for the enterprise is dead — and frankly, it was never the answer. Pictures of your kids’ soccer team or where the team should go for lunch does not deliver business value. This is what I call the first wave of social business, and it’s long over.

But to equate that with the future of standalone social business software is flat-out wrong.

Those companies that deliver rich, collaborative, and innovative platforms for people to get real work done are winning. These platforms go way beyond the stream so that people can do more of what they love (and get paid to do) –- code, develop, sell, market, innovate, etc.

I believe these platforms won’t come from the IT-centric mega-vendors who are simply bolting on social to their current offerings to sell more business process stuff –- just look at their track records.

So for the record, 2013 is not the year that standalone social business platforms go away, but instead it’s the year that social business goes mainstream. It’s about time.

Matt Tucker is the co-founder and CTO of Jive Software. He is responsible for the long-term technical and strategic direction of Jive’s products. Along with Bill Lynch, Matt founded Jive in 2001 and has helped build the company from just two people to where it is today. You can find Matt on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Social business image via samarttiw/Shutterstock

Schachter left Google in June (he sold Delicious to Yahoo back in 2005), and his new company came to light earlier this month. Union Square’s Albert Wenger (formerly president at Delicious) announced today that he has invested in the company, along with Andreessen Horowitz and a group of angel investors. A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed that funding round totaled $3 million, and that Wenger has joined the Tasty Labs’ board of directors.

So what does Tasty Labs do? Wenger isn’t saying, and the Los Altos, Calif. company’s website isn’t saying much either. The website says that it won’t offer pet food reviews, won’t create open source operating systems for unmanned aerial vehicles, won’t be a marketplace for used satellites, and that it aims to put “the useful back in social software.”

Hopefully, we’ll find out what actually means soon.

Chatter was marketed more as an add-on to Salesforce’s customer relationship management platform, rather than a new innovation to help its customers with business collaboration, he said. That made it difficult to attract new users and help the service grow into something that could generate a lot of revenue for Salesforce.

“The way you get the most value out of a platform like Chatter or Yammer is in making them as pervasive as you possibly can,” he said. “Salesforce has made it hard for people who are not Salesforce customers to get on the platform, use it, get value out of it.”

Meanwhile, Yammer recently revamped its business micro-blogging software to behave more like a Facebook for enterprise users and has seen a lot of success as a result. With Yammer, it’s free to join, and the company makes money off subscription models for premium services and off IT servicing, Spain said.

Chatter is available to people who already use Salesforce’s CRM software, and companies have to pay $15 per user per month to be able to access Chatter without the Salesforce CRM software. That makes it hard to justify introducing the business collaboration service into a work environment that hasn’t had any time to try it out — whereas Yammer users can try it out before they invest in the software’s premium services.

“Because of the way Salesforce approaches the Chatter business model, it’s hard to justify,” he said. “Until you make it easy, and in my opinion free, to get access to it you’re never going to maximize your value.”

Salesforce, one of the largest CRM software providers, was one of Emergence Capital’s first investments. Emergence also invested in Yammer, which launched two years ago. Yammer has already attracted more than 90,000 companies, and about 80 percent of the largest companies in the world on the Fortune 500 list use the social enterprise network.