We’ll see where it goes, although everyone is about 2 years behind my predictions from 2002/2003 – the connection of social media to marketing has been pretty obvious, as much as some people shudder at “ruining the purity of the social conversation” – nevertheless, it’s there, and people are making some great progress in integrated marketing.

In all seriousness, back in 2002/2003, I was heavily diving into social networking, and one of the most obvious “enrichment” aspects of social information was in the CRM and direct sales applications (see Death of a Salesman, Birth of Relationship Intelligence from 2004 – http://voicethread.com/share/95816/).

Being able to provide salespeople (OR marketers OR product managers, etc.) with a much greater depth of information about their prospects or customers, while somewhat creepy (“those pants you bought from J. Crew last week at $19.99 look great on you, sir”) if taken to extreme, it can certainly help enrich the conversations between people that happen, as there are more points or connections of reference between people. Computers are supposed to eliminate the burden of data collection, and making sense of it all, right? Give an already gifted salesperson even smarter tools, and heck, we might even power ourselves out of this economy!

I wrote a lengthy description of similar scenarios in the context of InsideView and relationship intelligence last year (see http://www.biztechtalk.com/2008/04/aiimalert-insid.html) – might be thought-provoking for your readers, if ever so slightly dated.

My position remains – “we ain’t see nothin’ yet” (but we’re getting real close to driving serious business benefits in a sustainable way, out of social networking, conversations, and engagement).

And of course, for those sitting on the sidelines, you’ll NEVER see any ROI if you aren’t experimenting and eventually actively/daily using these solutions. Sit and wait and let your competitors run away up the curve, if you like, or get into the game and make it happen. You might think it’s still “early adopter” stages, but 5-7 years into the curve, how much longer are you going to wait?

Best,
Dan