The great challenge for contemporary marketing is summed up very nicely in Rethinking Marketing (Harvard Business Review, Jan 2010):

'Never before have companies had such powerful technologies for interacting directly with customers, collecting and mining information about them and tailoring their offerings accordingly.

And never before have customers expected to interact so deeply with companies, and each other, to shape the products and services they use.'

And to really put this into perspective we, as consumers in 2010, are at a stage where are the least connected we will ever be...

Now, as a group who have worked both on CRM programs (the inside-out view of large corporations) and on social media programs (bringing the outside-in consumer viewpoint to large corporations), we understand one of the best kept secrets about this marketing challenge. It is the proverbial 'elephant in the room' and is often missed by social media experts and marketers more generally.

Simply, it is that the primary challenge is not social media or the willingness of consumers to engage with you as a brand. There is an abundance of evidence now that consumers will engage with your brand online, that this does not have to be an expensive exercise and that with persistence and humility towards your customers you will start to make significant progress.

No, the real challenge is the internal challenge and how far you can actually leverage that consumer engagement and feedback. The real challenge is the very nature of our organisations and the role that marketing plays within them.

From Rethinking Marketing again:

'Companies need to shift their focus from driving transactions to maximising customer lifetime value. That means making products and brands subservient to long-term customer relationships. And that means changing strategy and structure across the organisation - and reinventing the marketing department altogether.... 

The key distinction between a traditional and a customer-cultivating company is that one is organised to push products and brands whereas the other is designed to serve customers and customer segments, or at least tightly targeted at thinly sliced segments.

In the new customer department, customer and segment managers identify customers' product needs. Brand managers, under the customer managers' direction, then supply the products that fulfill those needs. This requires shifting resources - principally people and budgets - and authority from product managers to customer managers.'

These changes need to be supported by a new set of customer metrics (hence our focus on Net Promoter Score initiatives) to gauge the effectiveness of customer strategy and guide the allocation of resources.

Some cautionary advice about this post - don't wait until you have customer-centred organisation structure before you embark on your social media journey! You could be waiting a long time. Just be aware of the internal implications of your social media baby-steps. The reality is that engaging with your customers online is likely to be one of several triggers for important changes internally.