I presented at the Social Networking Conference a few weeks ago and had hoped to share a video of that presentation but due to technical difficulties by the videographer there is no video to share. I have shared the slides below. I’ll be the first to admit the slides by themselves do not tell the whole story. For that you’ll just have to come see me speak at some point. But I did want to share the perspective I presented.

The Windows Social Media team is focused on maintaining an ongoing conversation with our customers regardless of whether we have a campaign in market. Our Anytime, anywhere approach is about building channels and putting tools in place to be able to constantly know what consumers are saying and have a built in mechanism to talk to them. We don’t want to wait for a campaign to talk to our customers and we certainly don’t want to wait for a special occasion to get feedback. I think of Social Media as the new CRM – and that’s how I’m explaining it to my executives.

Here’s a picture of me and a bunch of somewhat interesting data points about myself. This data could be interesting to marketers if they are targeting moms, travelers, skiers or maybe entertainment lovers. Traditional marketing says this data has to be collected, stored, scrubbed, etc if a marketing team wanting to maintain a database to reach out to their customers with coupons, offers or product information. Think monthly newsletter or DM flyers. But what if you as a brand don’t have to host, manage and maintain that database…

Here is where you can find all the data points I identified above… on my Facebook profile. Get it? People are putting the data out there in droves. And it doesn’t rely on the brand anymore to solicit, manage and store it.

So you have to ask yourself as a brand marketer, are you inviting your customer on a first date? Wining and dining them and then not calling in the morning. How do you think that makes them feel? They’ve raised their hand, right. Said they are interested in you shoe, car, bag, whatever. They maybe even did something to try and get your attention like creating a commercial or designing a new logo. Did you say thank you? Figuratively and maybe even literally. If you are a non-profit it’s even more important. Did they give you money? They are a part of your extended community now. You should absolutely have programs in place to continue the conversation with them, especially if you want to ask for money again next year.

Here’s the deck: