While researching a project on social media ROI, a Deloitte consultant mentioned something that opened my eyes.

"So let's think about social CFOs," he said. "Think about the close the books process for a large multi-national corporation. That is inherently a social and analytical activity."

I've been thinking about it ever since we spoke, in part because I never imagined how the use of social media within organizations might pose opportunities for the corporate finance function.

Chances are, you are hearing about social media, and social media investments, in your organization. Like cloud computing, I've watched smaller organizations jump into social media first to improve customer service, sales force performance, internal knowledge management, recruiting and retention and many areas of customer experience management. But larger companies, including B2B concerns like Xerox and many others, are also applying social media to business risks.

What these early efforts show is that social media represents a large, varied and difficult-to-define entity. Those companies that have deployed it most effectively to date tend to treat social media well beyond any of the currently "trending" platforms we hear about, such as Twitter, Facebook, Google + or the Next Big Thing currently being created by an army of Red Bull-chugging code wizards in Silicon Valley.

As with all forms of innovation, the smartest "movers" start with a business risk (i.e., a threat or opportunity) they want to address and then apply the technology to the risk. So, how do the CFO's own function and responsibilities figure as an opportunity that can be exploited through social media?

I intend to answer that in more detail after reconnecting with my Deloitte source after he speaks to this topic at a conference this week.

Here's an initial stab: Social media may be able to help companies mine more information about their closing process to improve their closing process. And that information can lead to a faster, more accurate closing process. By capturing the discussions about accounting judgments and treatments – information that currently does not appear in most ERP and general ledger systems – social CFOs can look back at the history of decisions and begin to spot patterns. These patterns should help point to process improvements as well as to threats and opportunities.

Yes, this idea is a bit out there (and also large and amorphous, just like social media). But that should excite CFOs, even those who (like me) would be perfectly happy if they never created or digested a Tweet in their lives.

What should also excite finance executives is that the consulting and vendor community eager to sell you on these and related ideas appear well-aware of the pitfalls of over-hyping The Next Big Thing. I'm not hearing any comparisons of organizational social media to ERP, CRM or GRC. The closest thing I would compare social media to is e-business, a term we don't even use anymore because e-business is just plain business.