Brands are still in the very early stages of figuring out how to use social networks to sell product. Much has been made of brands dipping their toes into Facebook and MySpace. There is a clear distinction to be made here, are we talking about advertising or Customer Relationship Management (CRM). I don’t think most brands have yet figured out how to use social networking for marketing. Most brands are trying to wrap 'traditional’ tactics (digital banners)  into the new mediums and it’s not successful. No big surprise there. Marketers have yet to think of social media as a CRM program, which is exactly how we are thinking about it in Windows.

Yes we collect friends and fans on our Windows Facebook and YouTube pages but for us that’s just the beginning, for many brands that the end. Think about adding friends as the same thing as developing a database in CRM terms. You spend a certain amount of time and resources to create these databases of customer information. But creating the database is only the first step. If you never do anything to reach out to that database and inform your customers what is the value of that database? $0. CRM  programs are focused on reaching out to the customers on a regular basis, offering valuable information, moving customers through the product life cycle and hopefully reselling them and keeping the cycle going. We have someone on our team who is responsible for customer engagement on those pages. If you don’t have resources to manage and maintain your communities on these social networks, don’t build them. Would you build a database of customer information and then have no plans to actually use it? No. If you build a brand page you are doing the same thing. If you build it they may very well come. But when they get there who’s playing the game? Is it worth watching? It matters.  And is it interesting enough for them to stay?