Cloud Based Social Media and the Conversational Web

Recently, Pandora started telling its users what type of music their Facebook friends enjoy.  Now, if sites like Facebook and Pandora could tell me more about what my customer base enjoys, I might find more value in their advertising efforts.

Social networking trends come and go, attempting to allow people to better get to know their friends, colleagues, customers, and anyone else they network.  If sites like Facebook and Pandora could develop social networking technology to let businesses know what their customer base enjoys, so they could get to know them better, that would be valuable.

In social media advertising, a business owner doesn’t need Facebook to tell them about products they already know they may like or need, they want to know what types of products their customers and potential customers like or need.

Recently, mobile social networking leapt into a new frontier when HP acquired a cloud based social media marketing platform called Melodeo, which includes Nutise and MobilCast social media marketing, for $30 to 35 million dollars.  So, what does HP intend to do with the musical social networking platform it paid all that money for?  Time will tell, but they have something up their proverbial sleeves.

The beauty of Melodeo’s MobilCast is that users can listen to playlists they downloaded from the iTunes, or they can listen to their friends’ playlists.  Using those playlists, MobilCast discovers other music users may enjoy based on a music cloud.  I imagine it works pretty much the same way with friends’ playlists.

Social media marketing platforms are beginning to draw in more and more users through cloud based efforts, in which they can discover users’ interests based on users’ social media marketing trends.  Now, if they can harness that power to let business know more about their customer bases’ shopping habits, businesses might spend more money on their social media marketing efforts.

For now, until social networking sites start helping businesses listen to their customer bases’ habits, businesses would be wise to listen to the conversational Web through services like the ones listed in my blog on Listening to the Conversational Web.  For those who aren’t quite sure they want to spend the marketing dollars on listening, you can also check out this great blog on 25 Monitoring Tools that will not cost you a penny by Mirna Bard.  Whether you spend money or don’t spend money on listening to your customers, make sure you spend the time to listen to them.  Your business and your business endeavors will be better for it.

Do you have any comments? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Comment here, Tweet me, or e-mail me.

Erick