In exactly one month I will be off on a 4 week trip around South-East Asia with my partner. We’ll be covering 3 countries (Cambodia, Laos & Vietnam) and stopping in at least 8 different places which means a whole lot of hotels, transport, tours & activities to be organised.

My first big overseas trip was about 7 years ago, a 3 month stint in South America, and back then most of my travel planning was done by consulting my trusty Lonely Planet guide. Things have certainly changed over the past few years and while I’m still not ready to ditch the Lonely Planet guide, most of my planning for this trip has been through social networks.

For those of us involved in building healthy online communities, or indeed anyone just curious of where the social web will go, the emerging science of social networks is fascinating. Tim touched on an aspect of this his last post and as practitioners we are all learning - both from academia (see Duncan Watts Six Degrees - the Science of Connected Age) and from real lessons on the ground.

As we help; design, commission, analyse and manage online communities for a living, we are constantly on the look out for ways to convert the raw customer energy of a network into a more convertible currency - hopefully with pictures of famous Australians on the notes.

In the last month we have been chin-deep, managing&moderating a mixture of client; blogs, idea exchanges, ratings and twitter channels.

What's in a name? Well, a lot it seems, if you are setting the scene for an ongoing discussion. Take this blog site for example...  we are talking with marketers, customer activists (eg other bloggers!) and indeed anyone interested in how brands can engage with customers and prospects online to achieve their marketing objectives. And... in a manner that represents a genuine exchange of value! Bit wordy isn't it! A label would be handy...

At a time when there is significant rationalisation of the CRM Application Vendor market - and well established brand names are fading or disappearing altogether, are CRM vendors keeping up with the developing trends in social networking and conversational marketing?  Are these vendors catching the wave or facing the wall?

Conversational Marketing as CRM Navigation  CRM - It was such a sensible idea at the time! The one customer view, a corporate memory for the customer, the left hand knowing what the right is doing, treating different customers differently, measuring the return on marketing investment... The results have frankly, been well......    underwhelming. The irony is, of course, that the "C" part of "CRM" has too often just gone missing in action...