I dug a little deeper and found a bit of anecdotal evidence on the impact of social media on email consumption from The Nielsen Company. This seems to support the notion of higher email consumption by those engaged in social media.

This got me thinking about treating email with a bit more respect than it has received recently as a result of the attention drawn to the newer social media channels. I’ve also deployed social media strategy a few times now and know from my own experience that while social media can serve as an effective branding tool, using it for demand generation takes time and some “heavy lifting” – most notably by integrating communications across channels, including email.

There’s also another trend that makes direct marketing via email particularly attractive and that is the growth in mobile handset use to view email. Dating back to 2007 Marketing Sherpa data suggested that as much as 64% of emails were being viewed on mobile handsets, and mobile usage has only increased since then.

It’s striking then how many emails I receive on my Blackberry that are simply not viewable on the handset. And it seems that at least in North America, the Blackberry still owns the highest market share for “intelligent” handsets.

While I’ve always preferred text email to html for deliverability and for giving email communication a personal touch, I’ve grown to prefer simple text email over html for several reasons. I simply value the information in an email vastly more than the formatting of that email. Of course, email needs to be readable, but beyond providing a convenient link, I’m simply not a fan of heavily formatted html email, and I suspect this is where a lot of direct marketing programs fail to reach their target.

While there seems to be active debate about the best practices in email viewability – perhaps described best here by one of my favorite email marketing bloggers — I personally use my Blackberry to screen emails, so marketers who provide me a simple text version sans the html win my attention. I’ve even come across a few cool simulation tools, one from a European company called Opera, and one specifically for simulating email on the Blackberry. But, I still keep coming back to what I’d like to think is the best practice in marketing to mobile email viewers. That is, providing an 8pt font link at the very top of html email that simply reads “if you are viewing this email on a mobile device, click here.” Personally, when I click that link I hope I’ll be viewing a text email, and not a mobile version of a web page or html email. Of course, this all might mean that it’s just time for me to upgrade to a Droid, and with Christmas around the corner, who knows …

Some b2b companies still regard social media as a b2c marketing channel and they haven’t decided social marketing is right for them. Others believe social media can help them in PR and demand generation, but they are postponing their programs until “things settle down.” Others just don’t know where to start.

So, what is the best way to improve results without increasing expenses? For most companies I believe the answer here is to shift marketing budget from traditional PR and marketing programs to newer digital marketing techniques. But, before addressing how to set priorities, how confident are you that your buyers are online and approachable via social media?

Earlier this year (February 2009) Forrester issued a Social Technographics Of Business Buyers study which indicated that while social participation varies across business categories, the majority of business buyers are engaging in social activities for business purposes (e.g., survey respondents categorized as “spectators” ranged between 65% and 74%). In addition, Forrester’s recent technographics report issued just last month indicates that social participation among all consumers is continuing a clear upward trend. Enquiro has also published an extensive library of research on “the Buyersphere” indicating again that business buyers are on line researching their purchases and making buying decisions.

But, as almost anybody who has tried will tell you, b2b buyers are harder to reach than b2c buyers. There are fewer of them, their considered purchases generally require extensive justification, and sales typically require multiple approvers. Does social marketing work for them too?

And, what about enterprise b2b buyers? These are the ones who have gatekeepers (i.e., personal assistants) that take their phone calls and manage their email inboxes. The “reach and repetition” of your marketing programs somehow needs to get through to these target buyers as well as to their circle of approvers and influencers. The scope of this challenge becomes clear when you look at the simple math behind b2b pipeline development (figure below).

What social media cannot do is change the b2b “numbers game” – that is the “top end of the marketing and sales funnel” needs to be very broad and deep: Broad in the sense that the funnel requires a large volume of “impressions” at the top, and Deep in the sense that the target audience at this level consists of many types of roles and levels of familiarity with your product or even the problems they address.

Like b2c programs, b2b needs to develop awareness, but b2b also needs to mature interest and establish relevance of a product in the pecking order of day-to-day business needs. This is a tall order that most traditional programs fail to meet because they are geared toward “reach and repetition” measurements.

These programs are structured within “messaging frameworks,” and generally equipped only to communicate one way (from company to target). As the illustration shows, success at the top of the funnel is dumbed down to measurements like “impressions” or “advertising value equivalents.” From there, the marketing programs paid for and executed by cash and resource constrained marketing organizations are the primary way to get the word out. This can make demand generation a very costly and unproductive exercise.

Social marketing is one of the few strategies that address these challenges. While it clearly has the ability to reach broad audiences that appear for the most part to be online, social marketing also has the very unique quality of addressing various buyer needs with every question or comment made in the public domain. So it’s not just that business buyers are online that makes social marketing so attractive. It’s this nature of social marketing that makes great ideas travel, and actually makes the very best ideas the most popular.

A key challenge then for marketers is coming up with these ideas that should claim the attention of target buyers and by their own virtue facilitate their viral adoption by the masses. This is why the “reach and repetition” of traditional PR and marketing has been replaced by “propagation and durability” of social media, or so say the folks at StradellaRoad. The real problem is that left to their own devices, traditional demand generation programs are likely to become even less effective moving forward at this “new game.” The task at hand: Use social mechanisms to seed valuable ideas that can take off and still be rooted in value your products can deliver.

But I don’t think the answer is to abandon traditional programs altogether – at least not now. Programs like email, telemarketing, and even main stream public relations are probably best augmented by finding ways to integrate them with newer digital and social marketing techniques. Marketing does need to figure out where their buyers “hang out” on-line and develop interesting ways to reach them. This means, prioritizing efforts will be key – which is basically where we began, and where I will continue this discussion.

The context of this case study was the familiar marketing cycle beginning with Awareness and progressing to an Opportunity, and it described the use of social media as a highly effective way to generate awareness. The ultimate goal: generating leads, and it came with metrics showing the benefit of using LinkedIn and Twitter – but specifically not Facebook — to socialize a webinar. Pretty much the very last thing mentioned (almost as a disclaimer) is that social media is a conversation medium. Unfortunately, little else in the presentation addressed this.

A similar approach to social media seems to happen when companies who are running lean marketing organizations turn to bolt-on social media programs (generally placed on the shoulders of Public Relations) that begin with a Twitter account or two, a blog, and blog commenting. Of course, these are all appropriate social media tactics, but the first thing that needs to happen is for product marketing to frame and selectively participate in “the conversation.” Here’s why.

When product marketing doesn’t flesh out the target personas in enough detail “me-isms” creep into the on-line dialog and topics tend to gravitate toward product and company “messaging” at the expense of delving into topics more relevant to the target role or business function. The problem is that on the Internet people expect insights from social media that they can’t get from the mainstream. This is why social media is generally NOT the place for traditional PR and carefully-crafted messages. More importantly, these insights need to map into their needs, and generally “let me tell you about me,” isn’t the way to approach this interaction. The rub — doing this effectively requires a much deeper understanding of the target customer than most b2b companies are accustomed and many don’t understand the relevance of a customer persona beyond the limited scope of their product.

As obvious as this seems, it doesn’t always translate into programs that intend to use social media as a branding tool but confuse it with “inbound marketing.” This is not just a debate about semantics. Associating social media with lead generation appeals only to the portion of your audience pre-disposed to thinking along this track. Consumers recognize this and interpret these programs as advertisements that they are not likely to pass along through their network. As a result, these programs do not leverage the viral nature of social media to reach a substantially new and much broader audience.

Sure, you can use social media to juice the results of outbound lead generation programs (e.g., advertising webinars via LinkedIn groups), but let’s agree there’s not a lot of conversation in that approach. Worse yet, because the program will most likely be viewed as advertising it can alienate the vast majority of your target audience that is conditioned to tune out advertisers. This is not to say that all advertising via social media is bad, but it’s just one component of what an optimal social media program should be.

By using social media to engage in open conversations (exposed to competitors, detractors, advocates, etc.) about the challenges, goals, and unmet needs of your “target persona,” brands can and do use social media to engage people they would not ordinarily be able to reach. This establishes a degree of relevance between them and your brand that advertising in any form generally cannot produce. On the other hand, Awareness is a binary thing — either you are aware or unaware of a brand. But the beauty of social media is that it can do something more that build awareness by establishing the relevance of your brand to a whole spectrum of unmet needs, which is why most people turn to social media in the first place.

Not that this is a strange notion. The low threshold of the follow-back or the friend confirmation as permission to communicate lends these tools to shameless self promotion. (Fortunately tools like Tweetdeck help us all sift through the noise.) In my case, I’m guessing the rationale behind the questions was pretty much traditional demand generation. It goes something like this: “If I get my message to 100 people, one of them will be interested. So, if Twitter and Facebook can help me identify a couple thousand likely prospects, I’ll get a couple dozen leads by posting messages about my product.”

The problem is that while social media can serve as a low cost broadcast channel, the real marketing power in these tools is that they provide an exceptional way to spread (or socialize) and refine information or great ideas. The broadcast part of social media is great, and you might even get your 1% the first time out of the box. But, if the focus of your posts are primarily to get recipients to do something for you (e.g., register on your website), email is probably a better tool. At least there, your legacy of distributing promotional offers is hidden within the email inboxes of your unwary and probably unwilling audience.

Social media gives marketing the ability to reach not only those pre-disposed to your product or cause, but also those casually aware or wholly unaware your product exists. Those people are not “shopping” and might not even recognize the need. But, if your ideas are interesting and appealing to a broad enough cross-section, chances are you can use social media to engage in conversation with like-minded people, and your ideas might have a chance at getting passed along to a much broader network than your own.

Especially in the B2B world, it’s the rare product or cause that meets this requirement of appealing to the masses , so rather than using social media as a broadcast channel consider using it as a way to talk to people with whom you might not ordinarily have a chance interact. If you practice doing this and gauge your skill at how many substantial conversations you are having or how many times your ideas have been passed along, you’ll be on your way to effectively incorporating social media into your marketing mix. When you do, most likely you’ll get your 1% and then some.

So what does it mean to personalize a brand, how do you do it, and what’s the role of social media? First off, the “brand experience” discussion is a bigger one than I can address here. For the moment, I’d even like to side step the impact of other digital media including website, advertising, and direct marketing to focus squarely on social media.

My reasoning: social content (AKA “the social Web”) is second only to the product ownership experience in its ability to influence opinions about a brand. It overwhelms other transient touch points (e.g., the buying experience) because over time it persists and it grows. Individuals can ignore it, but the social Web almost certainly represents the easiest and most available source for a vicarious, always-on brand experience where they can find:
1) Abundant user-generated content ranging from product feature reviews, owner testimonials, customer service stories, re-sale prices, etc.
2) Content that is largely viewed as more trust worthy compared to content published by marketing and PR types, and
3) Search results populated more densely by content from “people like me.” That is, social content gets more eyeballs — higher placement by search engines relative to similar content posted on all but the most skillfully optimized corporate web sites.

This makes social media a very powerful tool for product marketers to communicate a positive brand image. It’s not that public relations doesn’t have a role, but the context and participants in the social Web are different and more varied than for tradition PR. These conversations can be intricate, highly dynamic and thick with product and competitive details. Generally they are exposed to everybody — these are not carefully crafted messaging exercises. Regardless of who participates in the social Web on a company’s behalf, this is no place for hand shaking specialists so think twice about the skills required to engage customers in an environment as transparent, for example, as blogs and forums.

Getting back to a definition of personalizing a brand, among all else, it means developing a brand relationship through honest, first person communications. On Twitter, for example, I see many brand names marketing to their customer base — obviously trying to build a following. But is this the right path to take? The problem is that generally people don’t want to interact with a brand or trademark. They want to interact with other people. There is just something disingenuous about the anonymity of conversing with a no name person hiding behind a brand, and this gets to the “how?”

If you are working to develop an influencer network on Twitter, consider engaging as individuals, not as a brand. A great first step would be to set up personal accounts for all participants — executives and staffers who have complete profiles on LinkedIn or some other social network. You can still set up a corporate Twitter account for communicating company news, marketing events or handling direct inquiries, but if you plan to use social tools as a low cost broadcast channel, be very clear about the purpose of your branded account. It’s one thing to offer followers real time product alerts or promotional offers, but quite another to broadcast what barely qualifies as product news to a following that is looking for thought leadership or entertainment.

One criticism of this approach is that you wind up with multiple accounts to manage your brand presence, and that’s just on one network – Twitter. Thankfully, there are tools like Splitweet and Peoplebrowsr that make managing multiple accounts across multiple networks very achievable.

As in any social situation, if you are looking to make new connections, then it pays to be attractive and interesting. In the social Web, this usually equates to sharing unique insights, stirring up controversy, or being provocative in some way. You can even have fun and be funny, but don’t be boring and be careful with your mix of hard vs. soft content.

Whatever your approach the most successful tactics build an emotional connection – kind of a gut level affiliation with your cause. Even blatant brand advocates can succeed in doing this as long as they are transparent about their purpose, respectful of others, and in general follow an ethical high road. In almost any situation, mean doesn’t play well on the social Web, so don’t get into personal attacks. Flaming posts or trolling for a public fight in the social spheres often comes across like a purposeful, self indulgent exercise, even if you don’t intend it that way.

More so than products, people are multi-dimensional. Our professional lives coexist side by side with are personal lives and gradually the two are beginning to co-mingle on the social Web. There are plenty of examples in the mainstream media of business and personal interests converging. The most obvious are the public service broadcasts or educational programs funded by major corporations and broadcast without commercial interruptions on public television. Through their affiliation with charitable organizations (e.g., the United Way) and community outreach programs, the US National Football League (NFL) provides another very visible example of this strategy in action.

On the surface, these causes might seem to have little if anything to do with the product, but corporations long ago realized that by doing good deeds for the public at large, they are developing brand affinity with people who care about these causes.

Translating these analogies to the social Web, it’s very possible to develop multiple points of affinity between your constituents and your brand. This doesn’t mean becoming a change-the-world philanthropist or clogging your communications with pretentious do-good-isms. You can simply manage a mix of interesting or anecdotal content to break up the monotony. Communications don’t always need to be about products. It’s a good idea to identify causes that have broad appeal across your target demographic, and be purposeful in communicating them via social channels.

Probably the best example of executing the tactics I’ve described here (at least on Twitter) is @guykawasaki. He seldom varnishes his point of view, but he’s honest about his affiliations, interesting and anything but mean spirited. Though he has many people ghost posting on his behalf, he’s up front about it. And, it appears he personally manages all person-to-person communications himself. His is a good model particularly for executives to follow. Here’s a brief Q&A that describes his approach for Twitter.

Try leveraging these tactics within a broader personalization strategy and let me know how they work for you. But by all means be strategic in your approach. Don’t just dispatch your summer interns on the social Web with loosely defined objectives. That is an approach certain to disappoint you and potentially alienate your following.

Clearly when times get tough, it’s not surprising to see changes in marketing. But, what is happening at the top level of our largest corporations illustrates the tremendous amount of change taking place in the marketing function – the likes of which pundits like David Meerman Scott and John Jantsch have been talking about for quite some time now.

Dating as far back as 2004, Spencer Stuart identified several contributing factors for the high CMO turnover, and among them “a disconnect between the skills required of today’s CMO and those of the past.” It’s shocking that after working their way up the ladder, some executives would find their skills have not kept pace with business needs. Unfortunately, innovations in marketing have only accelerated the past few years.

Since 2004, a wave of new Web technologies have been introduced and made available to consumers for the first time (largely for free). All sorts of on-line discussion forums, Web directories, wikis and product review sites have sprung up, enabling consumers to find, create and socialize information across the Web fast.

A whole new generation of digital consumers is also coming of age, connecting and sharing on social networking sites like Facebook. The “echo boomers” are gradually displacing baby boomers whose consumption habits in any event appear to be aging less gracefully than they are. And, at the same time, the economy has slowed, leading consumers to question brand loyalties and scrutinize purchasing decisions more closely.

The new tools and desire to use them have created unprecedented levels of transparency not only in consumer markets, but also in traditionally opaque business-to-business markets. Today, over 90% of all on-line and off-line purchasing decisions start with a search of the Web. Buyers in significantly increased numbers are finding, researching, and comparing products on-line. But it’s not just that buying and consumption habits are changing — they are changing at warp speed. 

The relative isolation of buyers just a few years ago made it much easier for companies to meter-out their market communication across carefully controlled broadcast channels. They communicated in a virtual monotone to a mass audience – via static websites, press releases, emails, and advertising. Messages were broadcast with no real intention to engage individuals in a conversation. For the most part, customers got information that marketers wanted them to get, but customers themselves had virtually no voice at all. 

Things really changed with Twitter and the crush of social media tools that followed. Twitter wasn’t the first or most innovative social media tool, but like a lot of disruptive technologies it sparked sharp debate between enthusiasts and skeptics about the importance and relevance of our growing digital connectedness. Twitter also allowed good and bad information to go viral and spread rapidly.

Since Twitter, so many new tools have cropped up around the micro-blogging service that Brian Solis took the effort on his PR2.0 blog to chronicle about 100 of them. If only marketing were limited to Twitter, our changing world would be magically finite and easier to digest, but unfortunately this is not so.

Today, many companies (not just their CMOs) find themselves at a cross roads. Their executives are probably feeling a growing uneasiness from the need to do something different in marketing but lack of clarity about what to change first or next because the rules have changed. They need to connect with customers in new ways, but old-school marketing tactics are too clumsy and ineffective to serve them well. Of all the avenues provided by new social media and digital marketing technologies, which ones are most promising for them? Which should they pursue, and in what order?   How should success be measured?

These are tough questions and the reality is that in the new world of digital marketing and social media it might take some amount of resource and experimentation to figure out what is right for the business.  I like the “Google rule” when it comes to this – spend 20% of your time investigating new, innovative ideas.  Then, relentlessly execute with the remaining 80%. 
But to keep pace with their markets, companies can’t go it alone. I suspect most will need to look outside the four walls of their own business and develop new ways to “sense and respond” to customer sentiments. On the Web, you can’t be everywhere, all of the time, so marketing will need to adapt new strategies that help them learn from customers while they leverage the eyes and ears of their biggest brand advocates to help guide the way.

As usual, marketers need to keep a watchful eye on competitors’ digital marketing tactics, but more so they need to do their homework and seek out the best and brightest ideas from experts who can help.  Maybe this is why CMO turnover is so high in the first place – marketing is perceived as being too inward focused and preoccupied with day-to-day tasks that they are incapable of bringing fresh new ideas into the organization. 

I’m convinced the CMO job doesn’t need to be a revolving door, but the marketing discipline does need to reinvent itself.  It’s clearly no time to cocoon behind closed doors, but it won’t work to simply mimic what others are doing either.  I’ll be writing more soon about strategies to personalize your brand using digital marketing techniques, and I’d like to hear from you.  If you agree or disagree with the points I raise here, let me know.  What digital marketing strategies are you using?  What is working or not working?  How are you measuring success?

Rohit is right that social media plays a part here, but it’s a complex mix right now.  Customer service communities (e.g., Helpstream), marketing communities (e.g., HiveLive), and word of mouth marketing (e.g., Zuberance) all play a part.  At this point, it’s anybody’s guess which approach (or combination of technologies) will rule the day and what the optimal mix of people, process and technology will be for different kinds of businesses.

I do think it is safe to say that at least in North America most companies will find some element of social media to be critical in their service, marketing and sales programs.  The practitioner leaders are and will continue to pave the path, and some will gain significant competitive advantages by being first to endear their brand with customers by closely aligning their products and services with the distinct preferences of their customer base.  The reason — customer advocacy morphs the relationship dynamic from company / customer to peer / peer, and it’s much more difficult to displace the latter than the former. 

Those companies who lag too far behind in this regard and who remain too comfortable with traditional product, service and marketing constructs may very soon find themselves hopelessly minimized in their target market(s) by more innovative companies.  Their prom dates will have already left the ball with somebody else.

The difference in this wave of innovation is the speed of change and the amount of wiggle room for error.  Unlike many previous innovations, this wave doesn’t require a huge technology investment, so anybody can play – there are plenty of relatively affordable social media toolsets available.  The obstacle this time is more cognitive, and those who make the mental shift can quickly break away from the pack.  In this regard, since smaller companies tend to be more organizationally agile, you might say the playing field might even be tilted to the benefit of small and medium sized business (SMB) than it has been in recent past.

Here is what I mean.  Sincerity is a requirement for any interaction – personal or professional.  Would you really want to be in a relationship with anybody who isn’t sincere?  I think for almost everyone, the answer to this is a resounding “no.”  Social media is no different, and if companies are not dedicated to sincerity with their customers, they will likely find social media to be a train wreck in slow motion.  But, before we agree on the need to be sincere, let’s agree on what this means.

Sincerity means engaging customers as equals and having the willingness to proactively adjust strategies, organizations and product offerings.  Moving forward, many companies might find sincerity requires the need to displace or reduce sales and marketing organizations with larger product and service teams and better customer-facing technology infrastructure.  (After all, if true customer advocates are going to be doing the selling for you, why would you need to pay sales people high commissions or marketing people to generate “leads?”) These will be difficult decisions, and this is just one example. Sincerity implies the willingness of c-level players to make some very basic structural decisions about how company resources will be allocated to address the changing needs of their customers and target markets.  This is much easier said than done.

My guess is that companies will find that social media exposes areas of weaknesses – product shortcomings, organizational dysfunctions, unserved needs, and competitive threats.  It gives voice to customers, and by virtue of the democratic nature of the Web it happens whether companies participate or not. 

Companies can choose to ignore it and even attempt to shout over the conversation with traditional advertising and PR strategies, but in the long run this won’t work. Social marketing and sales initiatives will need to be built on sincere relationships so to be successful, companies will need to consider how prominent of a component sincerity will be to their brand. 

If you have a category killer product with great features and break away technology you’ve either found yourself to be extremely lucky or your product teams have engaged customers and understand their needs already.  Why not formally extend that “discovery” practice to the after sale relationship with customer community and word of mouth programs?

On the other hand, if you have an average product, maybe investment in R&D should come first. If you find yourself anywhere in between, using service as a differentiator and leveraging word of mouth marketing to build customer advocacy is something you probably should not put off for too long.

First reported by Anthony Ha of VentureBeat, Service Cloud christened “the era of cloud computing” and came with some fanfare – a stable of pre-briefed pundits and even a CrunchBase profile. Their well choreographed launch garnered mention in over 20 articles and blogs by my count (and I stopped counting a while ago). 

What I found most interesting wasn’t the headline at all. Several companies including arch rival Oracle have declared movement into the “Social CRM” arena for a while now. It was the mention of SEO in the context of Customer Service that caught my attention. As reported by Jeff Widman of TechCrunch the SEO promise read “SEO–make sure your company’s community shows up high when I reach for Google.”

Whether fully supported or not, the capability sounded reasonably straight forward:

1. connect to social networks, forums, blogs and other sites where your company’s products are mentioned,
2. funnel that information into your own web-based knowledge repository.  Now you have a repository about your products and related information – presumably containing all the latest questions, comments, recommendations, partner offerings, reference requests, etc.
3. enable customers to socialize that content by adding comments, voting it up/down, adding follow-up questions, linking other relevant information on the web, etc.
4. expose the knowledge base to search engine spiders and let it be indexed. 

The result of this is you’d now have a bevy of content filled with clustered keywords, authored by customers themselves, all pointing to your domain. Now, the more customers get conditioned to using a web-based Service community for answers, the more they’d naturally do so in response to real life events (e.g., new product launches, new partnerships, competitive developments, economic pressures, etc.). This means they would continue to actively populate community sites with all sorts of content filled with the exact keywords pertinent to the day – questions, answers, referral requests, etc. And, this is the type of content (void of marketing spin) that customers seem to want the most.

But, it’s not just customers who would find this information when they reach for Google – so could prospects (shoppers), partners, competitors, your competitors’ customers, your partners’ customers, and so-on. The implication: for companies who not only want to participate in social media, but who go the next step to hosting their own community, they’ll be a great deal easier to find on the web. But, if your company and products suddenly become easier to find via natural search, why would you continue to invest additional funds into paid search?

The thing is, until now, being found via search on the web was a matter of tinkering with expert generated web-site content and meta data, and paying to be found via paid ads. Even key word based “inbound marketing” techniques rely on carefully selected anchor text and careful search term selection. Now, with companies deploying community applications there is a truly organic path to seeding natural search, and one that is destined to follow the sentiments and interests of the participants in nearly real time – or at least as real time as the latest web site crawl from Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. Particularly for companies actively monitoring their community, this would seem to be the ultimate source for drastically improved natural search results. 

What’s happening on the paid search side is even more telling. This morning, for example, Andy Beal reports an Efficient Frontier predication that search revenues are dropping, and he asks if Google revenues will reflect the same. Now we are in a severe recessionary down turn, so it’s no surprise that quarterly earnings across the board will reflect tough times; in this case, smaller marketing budgets. But, as with any investment outlook, the long term is often more compelling than the short term.

It’s not just that search revenues are down last quarter, or that ad-based business models (once all the rage) seem to have dropped out of vogue, or that my boss cut my paid search budget six months ago. If you look behind the headlines, we may be seeing a not-so-subtle shift away from traditional SEO and paid search strategies to community strategies. For one, paid search expense is proving ineffective – people are getting tired of broadcast messaging and marketing spin. Two, the promise of SEO via communities might be displacing or at least freezing search spend. And, three, we’re seeing the first evidence of broad interest of Service-focused communities that could bring with it tectonic implications for paid search long term.  Here’s why.

Salesforce is a bell weather CRM company, and their customers seem to be very interested in Service communities. In the Service Cloud announcement, we’re seeing a shift in attention around web-based Service communities from a handful of early adopters to the early majority. It remains to be seen whether we’re at the tipping point where web-based Service communities combined with word of mouth marketing tools and clever tactics completely or substantially displaces paid search, but in this harsh economic environment a few things are clear.

In marketing, deep cost cuts are a fact of life. On the service side, it would be hard to imagine a time when retaining customers could be as important as it is today. This combination will certainly motivate many companies to entertain structural changes in the way they market and service their products. Web-based service communities simply represent too much promise to be ignored as a way to substantially improve both marketing and service — cutting hard dollar costs and enabling companies to get closer to customers to better service their needs.

Over the next 12-18 months or however long this recession lasts it’s likely that many of your competitors will explore web-base Service and Marketing communities for their potential. Just as likely, some will have begun to lay the groundwork for their own community initiatives. If you are a marketing or service professional who has not yet evaluated web-based community strategies, you are rapidly approaching the risk of being behind the learning curve by putting it off much further.

But it’s not enough to simply know what’s possible. You will need to discover how to leverage social tools and community strategies appropriate for your company, its stage, your market and your customers. Good advice would be to keep an eye out for first movers in your industry and learn all there is to know about what they are doing with communities and how they’re doing it.

It wouldn’t hurt to also follow news from the likes of companies like Google and Facebook. Whatever transpires to bring about wide spread adoption of web-based communities, one of these two companies will likely be in the middle of it. It’s not that every company needs a Facebook page, but the synergies between natural search, web-based communities, and social networks seem all too promising. So much so, that moving forward I’ll personally look at talk of a Google-Facebook combination a bit differently than I might have just a few short months ago.