At this point (4Q2011) everyone understands that the “social web,” i.e., Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, and the vast complex of blogs / forums / wikis, etc., is the new high ground in the war for eyeballs and mindshare. But I speak daily with C-Suite execs and VPs / Sr. VPs of Marketing and Product Marketing who have not yet grasped the bigger opportunity and the development imperative posed by social media. Let me cast it in these terms: the social revolution is fundamentally changing how businesses communicate with their customers, and if you want to grow through the remainder of this decade, you must participate in the right ways and on the right platforms.

The revolution is the migration of core business processes out onto the “social web,” and the extension of major brands onto an array of mobile devices including the iPhone, Android, iPad and other tablets. No central government or top-10 list of “industry leaders” in hardware / software / services will control the social revolution, instead, your customers will drive every key trend. This is new in business history, and it’s going to change how all of us work and achieve future growth.

The last time I personally experienced a comparable revolution was in 1995, when two entities called “The Internet” and “The World Wide Web” first burst into view. Looking back from 2011, we can see that all our lives and careers changed when the ‘Net was opened up to corporate development. Now, another equally powerful change is upon is:

• Facebook has 750 million users, and has emerged as the #1 source of Internet traffic.
• YouTube is the #2 search site, and social web video is replacing television for many demographics.
• People and companies are managing their activities “on the go” via iPhones and iPads, not PCs.
• By 2013, we will have more than 12 billion Internet-connected devices active, world-wide, most of them smart phones and tablets.

Here’s the bottom line: in 1995-96 every growth-oriented firm had to begin leveraging the Web; in 2011/12 every firm that wants to optimize growth must become a social enterprise. What does that look like? Check it out, below >>

Corporate “Fan” Pages on Facebook

Corporate Facebook development is moving forward at a furious pace. Industry leaders like Dell, Disney, Toyota, Coca-Cola, Warner Brothers, Burberry, Kelly Services and many other world-beating brands are already engaging with their clients across the social web. This is *NOT* fluff or a waste of time. . . it’s growth-centric, revenue-focused, and it’s absolutely the next wave in the science of customer acquisition. Catch that wave or not — it’s your choice — but know that your smartest competitors are already building out their Facebook Fan pages with custom apps, and developing Ruby on Rails applications on the Heroku platform, so their brands, products and services can be just as strong a “draw” on millions of iPhones and iPads as they are (currently) on “old-style” www-domain name-websites.

There’s another vital element to becoming a social enterprise — it’s what I call “social intelligence.” It involves using sophisticated analytical packages like Radian6 to measure and drawing actionable intelligence from the conversations around your brand, and your competitors’ brands. Think of what an enterprise data warehouse with some first rate BI applications (Cognos, Business Objects) can deliver to any products-oriented business. Can’t really do business globally without it, right? OK, that’s what Radian6 will do for you in the area of social media, on your path to becoming a social enterprise. With the Radian6 tool set (better yet: an agency with the tools, and the expertise to use them) you can determine:

• The volume of social conversation around your brand, products and services
• Positive / negative sentiment around your brand & offerings
• Your “share of conversation” and “share of voice”
• The platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, etc.) that your customers favor
• Who the “top influencers” are in your industry vertical and product areas
• 1000s of other detailed metrics that will allow you to engage in a tactically smart way

The Radian6 Summary Dashboard and Engagement Console also deliver powerful capabilities, including (with the Engagement Console) the ability to create team “workflows” that put your people squarely in the middle of the real time conversations around your brand. In the years ahead, these apps will be viewed as indispensable, just as a line-of-business data mart with some good BI front end tools is indispensable, today, for anyone in retail or wholesale.

So I’ve mentioned popular social channels (Facebook, YouTube), social delivery platforms (iPads/iPhones…), and social intelligence tools (Radian6): the one thing I haven’t engaged is social strategy. That (as they say) is “a big subject,” so I’ll save it for my next post.

P.S. I spend a great deal of time delivering GoToMeeting demo’s on ALL of this to Marketing and Product Marketing execs (and sometimes the C-Suite). Don’t hesitate to ask: I’m at 1-800-795-7144.

John Woodbury
CEO Econiverse
www.econiverse.com

2.) The strongest (and smartest) growth companies with the deepest understanding of technology are using a three-level approach to online Demand Gen, that has (at its base) three sources of “raw leads” — SEO/SEM/PPC, Social Media, and E-mail campaigns. At the middle level they use powerful marketing automation apps (like Marketo), Social Listening tools (like Radian6), and analytics including Google, Omniture, WebTrends, etc., and then — when leads become strong opportunities — they pass those leads on to Salesforce CRM, at the top of the Pyramid.

3.) You could write 10,000 pages on the best practices at every level, but two things stand out: first, the growth leaders *fully integrate everything* up and down the line. So, for example, Marketo cookies the machines of visitors to your landing pages (that they got to through your PPC ads), and builds dynamic profiles that are synched with Salesforce CRM. In the meantime, Radian6 is pulling data from the social Web and combining it with Google and Omniture analytics, and slicing & dicing things right down to the level of *which tweets drove the greatest numbers of conversions*(!) Second, the growth leaders understand that their salespeople LIVE IN SALESFORCE, and that they have zero tolerance for crap leads . . . so they nurture and “score” all contacts progressively, over time, and follow the strong opportunities via social media, so that only when a lead is vetted and verified as something “real” does it appear in a salesperson’s queue, in Salesforce CRM. This is the paradigm for intelligent leads management and Demand Gen, circa 2011.

I’ll have more to say on this subject after Dreamforce, where I plan to listen carefully to everything that Marketo, Radian6, Google, and (of course) Salesforce.com itself all have to say on this subject.

Happy hunting,
John Woodbury
CEO Econiverse
www.econiverse.com