Social CRM for Business: Analytics Can Spur Greater Success

You can even take a look at your product sales figures and correlate them to the customer sentiments you find online. "I suspect you will find out that there's a direct connection between your products and the sentiments people are leaving," he says. "Happy customers buy more products."

And don't forget to also take a look at competitors, too, and benchmark yourself against them to find out how your company is doing in comparison in the world of online comments from customers.

"That can help you discover some metrics," Pombriant says. "If the CEO discovers that his competitor's customers are happier than his, he can declare war" and drive new improved metrics based on social media research. "It can be the root for a new charm offensive."

And there's still more to come in this evolution, he says. "What we're looking at is a transition state, not a final solution," Pombriant says. "We are in a customer intimacy age. If we want to sell more we need to be listening."

Soon, the new information companies that are gaining through social media will be brought into product development to give instant feedback from customers on what they want to buy, he says. That will lead to new products that arrive faster than ever. "In the product development world historically, companies have prototyped and thrown spaghetti against the wall to see if it stuck. In this age, though, in order to be successful you can't still throw spaghetti against the wall because it's too expensive to do." With social media development, you'll know more about customer desires before you spend product production money.