Can CEO’s, CMO’s, and CFO’s agree on Social Media Listening?

With Facebook at 300 million members,  CMO’s and CEO’s still struggle with the social media landscape and question its place in the evolution of marketing.  We’ve been talking all year about how brands struggle with and should leverage social media…but to many, the options just keep changing/expanding with complex ways to reach more communities.

The Omniture  and Adobe combination will be very interesting and may provide the needed content perspective and approach  to holistic marketing.  I’m a fan of  Josh James, Omniture CEO, and believe they have a great opportunity to take their product/client relationships to the next level with Adobe.  Lets revisit this Omniture slide, that was posted to simplify the landscape.  At  the risk of further complexity,  it seems one circle should be added to highlight the impact that private communities have on brands.  

Though not new, private communities are growing as a channel for leading brands  to engage and listen to their customers on a variety of topics and issues.  From product development and competition, to lifestyles and customer service–there are few topics that are not discussed within these diverse sets of target audiences and customers today.  With the help of emerging companies like Communispace, Hive Live  and Passenger,  which can host and facilitate discussions, CMO’s and CEO’s are listening up and tapping into this type of information that used to only be available through focus groups or market research. 

The smart CEO’s are (personally) listening more and avoiding being the center of the conversation.  While two-way dialogue works with B-B clients, it is best to let B-C customers take the lead through facilitated and open discussions.  Smart CMO’s are integrating social media/networking groups holistically into their marketing platforms to surround themselves with a faster feedback loop to their most important assets–customers and prospects!  They are also using  monitoring companies like cymfony.com to listen to and integrate the (raw) feedback that is happening on the non-private sites.   And the smart CFO’s…they are starting to ask how to shift some traditional marketing and research budgets over to private online communities and other listening platforms.