1. Social Media Insurance — while good things might happen, bad things definitely do happen.  I’m thinking of it like ADT or other security alert system – “we’ll monitor your world so you can do your day job.” Scalable because it is defensive, systematic, and requires strong processes.

2. Briefing Book - answer the question ‘what do I need to know?’ about social media in my category.  Given the singular focus on a category or segment, this becomes a potential syndicated service (like an ACNielsen) where multiple divisions or business units benefit from a shared perspective - a beautiful thing.

3. Conversion - use existing profiles as part of the recruitment or conversion as opposed to lead gen process.  In education markets, when I think about this as a sales problem, then anything that can make an outbound contact more personal and relevant is useful.   This requires an ongoing data feed and training on the use of the information.

4. Participation - there are five ways a marketer and SPARK a conversation:

Stimulate - provide interesting things for people to talk about; product plans, exclusive stuff

Participate - join as one of equals; usually an act of desire and best done by the client.

Amplify - provide the platform, tools, and connections for an existing conversation to spread

Repair - correct facts, offer the other side of the story (part of the insurance above)

Kindle - nurture a group of people in the first instance and let them grow

5. Data - still the wild west here with all the unstructured stuff and the fact that we only collect what we can.  “I can’t get intent, but I can get the search term - thus I’ll infer intent”.   As an industry we don’t have the answer yet, but several possibilities could emerge.   The idea of interests is obviously of ‘interest’ but difficult for two reasons - low penetration (can’t get them all; and not everybody does it) and lack of categorization into useful or bite size chunks.   There’s no dimensional model yet for this stuff - just a bunch of words.  I’d treat it like tags and search clouds.

6. Advertising model - we need to rethink the intersection of message, medium, and immediacy.  Direct response doesn’t work in this space.  Is social media really a PR play in disguise?   Is it really the next iteration of telephones and email as a communication platform - advertising doesn’t work there; but other models do.  The key question is what aspects of marketing are best supported by social media?

7. Marketing Mix Models and Lead Scoring - given #5 there opportunities to look at both the high-level impact as well as the effect on a given individual. Marketing, pr and advertising are so intertwined these days that maybe we need to step back and take a fresh look at the problem of return on investment.