Social CRM for Business: Analytics Can Spur Greater Success

"It's an outgrowth of being social," he says. "Being social doesn't mean being nice all the time. Being social means telling it like you see it."

There's even a name for all of this new online marketing potential, he says. Forget about "e-commerce." That's so Year 2000. Instead, try F-Commerce, as in FacebookFacebook Commerce. Alles zu Facebook auf CIO.de

But before you schedule a staff meeting tomorrow to get your whole company on board the Facebook Express, take a breath, Pombriant advises.

It's not just being on Facebook and Twitter and then communicating with your customers, he says. It's also knowing the markets and audiences on those platforms and knowing what you need to do to communicate with your targeted audience. Again, that's where those pesky analytics come in.

"It's always been true that you need to understand your target market and it's just as true with Facebook," he says. "Some people see half a billion users on Facebook and they say that means it's a great market. But there's more to it than that. Yes, it's a big market but it's skewed towards women, with about 62 percent of the users being female."