Sorry it has taken me this long to get to respond, it has been a crazy couple of weeks. I think you are correct in what you are stating – for the most part – and we will see SM become more commonplace within organizations. However, the last sentence you put in there – social customers will become the most profitable ones, is something that may happen — but not for a fairly long time.

Thanks for reading
Esteban

Google is far more efficient and convenient than Yellow Pages, email is far less expensive than direct mail and social media provides an opportunity for corporations to touch many more customers than could be done in the old school cycle.

Old school sales people would network through associations, trade groups, charities and golf. Social media allows them to cover far more ground then traditional means and will therefore become a greater part of the overall marketing and sales cycle.

The best and most profitable customers come from referrals and social media provides a perfect platform to enhance this.

Thanks for reading. Sorry for the time it took to answer, been busy over here.

I like the SEQ and agree on having a strategy. But agree more than anything that tools are not there yet. I don’t think it will hit mainstream anytime soon, I have been wrong before, but it is quite interesting to see interest and (hopefully) progress in the market.

Thanks for reading!

Also agree with you on the current limited ability for tools to capture ‘Socio-Emotional Quotient’(SEQ); if I can call it that; of the customer. To some extent I guess tools like Salesforce.com-Ideas, used for bubbling up opinions/views in a social community might be considered as assisting this. But before jumping right into the tools, a strategy to identify and categorize relevance (SEQ can run across vast categories), means to utilize them etc. have to be laid out in detail I think. So Sentiment analysis is of great importance and will gain further ground as social communities grow, but there is still some time before it hits mainstream.

Thanks!

Sid
@SiddMishra

I am glad you enjoyed the blog, I prefer this method (with analysis and time to present it well) over simply just twittering what is being said. You can also always refer to this blog for more details or a refresher – whereas twitter is probably vanished if you want to look at it.

I think you and I already discussed sentiments, so I am not going to add more than just saying you are right there.

Thanks for the read.

I have been shouting myself hoarse citing PEW stats for quite some time now (not on twitter or my blog, the other traditional channels like face to face, email, phone, powerpoint, etc.). Glad to see Paul take it up too.

Regarding Paul’s Edelman Trust Barometer citings, I do not want to be pessimistic, just want to understand the dynamics – 2009 mid year report states that the trust in businesses has gone up & pips the peers category. How did this happen? What does this mean? Of course, the numbers do not say that people have lost trust in their peers, only that the businesses have managed to garner back.

I like the social revolution & emotional connect aspects of Paul’s way of looking at customers.

However, emotions do not scale yet. I agree with you on that. Though we need to address the emotional aspects, we cannot promise the whole shebang from a technology perspective. The false positives alone add on to the otherwise humongous task!

I think that the next killer app for social networking is going to have to be surrounding reputations and rankings.

what do you think?