“Look five years out and almost every industry is going to be rethought in a social way. This stuff is so powerful; get on the bus.” This prediction was made by Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, in a recent briefing to journalists.

He may have been justly affronted by the way the film The Social Network portrayed him as a ruthless megalomaniac, but Zuckerberg’s interest in extending Facebook’s realm from the consumer world to the enterprise is certainly running high. At the briefing, he predicted that applications of all kinds — from ecommerce and entertainment to enterprise apps — will start to be built with specific social dynamics in mind.

“You can integrate a person’s friends into almost anything, and make the app instantly more engaging and viral,” he said. “It’s hard-wired into humans that you need to focus on what the people around you are doing. That is the structural thing that is going to make all these industries change.”

Zuckerberg went on to suggest that large ecommerce companies will start to offer customers incentives (think loyalty points or micro-discounts) if they use the social recommendation functionality and expose their purchase information to others. “If I share this [information] that makes more money for Amazon or whoever is allowing the share, then it should actually give some incentive to share stuff,” he said.

To create that layer, companies will increasingly integrate the Facebook functionality into their apps and websites. And he encouraged CIOs to be fearless. “In the enterprise space… no one is going to get fired for focusing on social networking; no one is going to get fired for having a social strategy.”

For more on Facebook:
• Sign in to our Members’ Area to read the views of Facebook’s head of engineering, Mike Schroepfer, on scaling the world’s largest application.
• Zuckerberg on Facebook’s recent move into unified messaging.