(5 posts)

To many in the social media world, today is the day of reckoning. Facebook has finally launched it’s own location based service, called Places to its 500 million users (the number is actually much less than that, since it’s initially only available to US based iPhone users). If you have an iPhone and you’re using the Facebook app, you can immediately start sharing your exact location with your friends by clicking the “Check In” button under the Places tab and finding (or adding) the nearest location (sidenote: Facebook says that Touch is also enabled, but I wasn’t able to use it on the latest versions of the default Android 2.2 browser, Opera, or Dolphin. I’m also hearing of iPhone users having initial problems). Your location will then be shared in your friends’ News Feeds, as well as with the “Place Page” of the location that you checked into.

My colleague Peter Kim recently wrote about visualizing the Social CRM ecosystem – pointing out it’s the part of social business design that starts with customers. My colleague Dion Hinchcliffe has also written extensively on the idea of social CRM.

While much of the discussion around sCRM correctly begins with a focus on customers, there’s an opportunity to use social tools to focus on consumers. The distinction being that customers already pay your brand for a product, whereas consumers have yet to make a purchase. Put simply, consumers make up your pool of prospects.vv

On a recent trip to Bermuda, I was inspired by the different types of collaborative behavior exhibited by the marine life that I observed.

Next time you’re out running some errands, give this simple experiment a try. Visit a national company that you know has a strong social media presence, and then ask an employee or two about some social tools. Is the clerk at the register familiar with any incentives for Foursquare check-ins? Can the teller help you with your iPhone app? Does the waiter know what Yelpers think? Does the sales woman know about the discount you just saw tweeted?

As British Petroleum struggles to contain one of the worst oil spills in history, a debate about the company’s online response is beginning to bubble to the surface. Some have questioned whether their purchasing of search terms is ethical. My former Forrester colleague Josh Bernoff points out that no amount of social PR can fix your company’s actual issues (and, as he predicted, BP’s attempts to shut down a parody Twitter account have led to even more bad press).