This year social media has been a huge topic on this site and others. "Social CRM" has been a hot topic for debate, including how it relates to "Enterprise 2.0."

But after returning from the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference and observing, Where is the Customer in Enterprise 2.0?, I wondered just how prevalent these terms really are.

Fortunately, Google has a app for that! Here are a few charts that illustrate trends for both searches and published content, courtesy of Google Trends.

Note: all of the charts were generated for global traffic for all years that Google has data. According to Google:

• Search data is scaled based on the average search traffic of the term entered
• News volume is not scaled, it simply shows the number of times the term appeared in Google News stories.

First, to set a base line, let's look at two major terms: ERP and CRM. Search volume has been trending down since 2004, although news volume has been steady the past couple of years. Clearly these terms are not going away, with CRM having a slight edge. Google Trends: ERP vs. CRM

Now let's look at "social media," all by itself. As expected, a big run up in search and news volume this year. Google Trends: Social Media

But how significant is this? Although still trailing ERP and CRM in search volume, "social media" news items have actually surpassed ERP and CRM this year. This clearly shows the media frenzy surrounding the next big thing, but that people are still searching more often for the last big things. Google Trends: ERP vs. CRM vs. Social Media

How about social media for business? Here we see that Enterprise 2.0 has been a hot term since 2006, but Social CRM really didn't really exist until earlier this year. Google Trends: Enterprise 2.0 vs. Social CRM

However, when you compare these newer terms to ERP, CRM, and Social Media, they barely register on the Google Trends charts. Google Trends: Let's Get Ready to Rumble!

Conclusion: these trends charts show that while interest in social media for business has been growing rapidly, "Enterprise 2.0" and "Social CRM" still have a long way to go to challenge ERP and CRM in search and news volume.