Ernest Hemingway once wrote: “When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.“ 

Both transmitting and receiving in real-time is the hallmark of effective communication and up ’til now Marketing has been entirely “push” and interuptive.  With the advent of Social Media Marketing, however, the advantage of gleaning market and customer insights ends up in a collaboration to build better products and services. 

However, it remains to be seen how many companies will truly allow for a 2-way conversation as this route will be a radical change from two primary methodologies that companies use to communicate with prospects and customers:  Advertising and Customer Service.  Only 60 of the Fortune 500 have adopted some sort of Social Media Marketing strategy so far (and most of those are only corporate blogs… again, a primarily “push” environment).  By embarking on a Social Media Marketing strategy, the biggest issue is that companies must be prepared to have processes in place to respond and ACT on the information (be it kudos or complaints) it receives.

… should be:

“What are you thinking?” instead of What are you doing?

All the quality Tweets are talking about what’s on people’s minds, what has their attention, and what is relevant at the moment.  Whether in the news, on the radio, in a book/magazine, or what just came up in the office.  More and more I’m  finding smart people dropping nuggets of info in this forum.