Who Am I In This New Connected World

Remember the time when "connected world" was a buzzword. When connected meant having a connection to the Internet. Fast forward to today and we enter the world of the social wars of Facebook vs Twitter vs Google+

Today's consumer, you and I live in physical as well as virtual networks in cyberspace. We have conversations with people in our network all the time and it is these conversations that businesses are interested in or what the geeks call signals.

A new market segment called social CRM has emerged recently which is attempting to allow organizations to tap into these virtual social networks. The challenges are huge and no one seems to have a definitive answer yet.

Identity is one key element which Google has recently been grappling with. For the most part social networks do not confirm an individual's identity unless they purchase something online. Business systems such as CRM maintain contact information and track transactions and interactions with individuals.

Social networks on the other hand are largely unstructured conversations. The primary touch points of interest to a business is mainly around products, services and the business in general. Accessing this data and making meaningful sense of it is another matter.

For starters there is no easy way for a business to associate content in social network sites such as Facebook with their contacts. It could be argued that there is no need for this after all the business is mainly interested in what is being said about its products and services. Whether this is a real contraint on tapping into social networks is yet to be seen.

Google made headlines with their stand on "real identities" for Google+ and in some ways I tend to agree that a real person is more likely to be credible than a pseudo identity. But if you look at the areas which have been put forward as areas that benefit from Social CRM, they are marketing, sales and services. Sales and Services interactions do depend on an individuals identify. Even with marketing, the approach of customising marketing content relies on the individual preferences, albeit not necessarily their real identity.

The topic of identity is one that will not go away and will need to be addressed as it is a significant part of integrating the social networking world with the world of business systems