Did many dive head first into the social and mobile bandwagon? Sure. But to say there is no bandwagon or profit to be made in these niches is not realistic.
Everyone knows there is a hype, but that hype is based on reality. Big consumer data already has a value per GB.
Some say Big Data is just Business Intelligence over a large amount of data. I don't disagree and I see a solid future for BI.
Managers and consultants should prepare for the big data storm that is to come. Learn about the possibilities and impossibilities of cloud computing and Hadoop. I believe in a few years even tech-savy consumers (who now own an iPad) are able to use Big Data on their own data. Anyone can already rent a few Amazon resources to compute, and work with technology invented at Google a few years ago (MapReduce, BigTable). Or if you don't want to reinvent the wheel, go for Big Data as a Service, like Cloudera or Splunk.
In exchange for discounts, consumers will hand over their data to companies for free. Coordinates or purchasing behaviour: everything gets stored. Companies are busy exporting old data from tapes, so they can run completer aggregate queries.
When more big data analysts emerge, some companies will be ready: They'll have datawarehouses filled with data. If you do not invest in big data, you'll soon lose your competitive edge in regards to BI and consumer data.
The people that are extolling the virtues of big data are usually external consultants. They were the same that told companies to focus on mobile apps, and before that, to create a social presence. You can rail against that, but that is merely an epiphenomenon of every hype: Not what is really about.
All big tech companies are preparing for the future of big data (Amazon, Akamai, IBM, Microsoft). Facebook has the largest known Hadoop cluster in the world (over 100PB). Google might process around 25PB of data each day...