Social listening
Some years ago, I read Jim Monroe's "Angry Young Spaceman". It struck a lot of chords with me about some of the flaws inherent in foreign aid (where I'd spent some time before my online life). But there was one throwaway part that keeps coming back to me: a bit where the main character is talking with his mother on the phone.* The mother keeps mentioning brand names in their conversation because every time she does, the company records it and pays her for advertising.
We're not all that far away from that now. The social platforms that have emerged have given us the ability to broadcast at a much more efficient rate than before. But they've also given marketers the tools to measure us: not only our preferences but our impact.
People have always had opinions. They've always been willing to share them (to a larger or smaller extent). But, now they have the ability to share them efficiently with people they may never meet in real life. In addition, they will use these platforms to repeat things that they've heard (or experienced).
Similar to the shift that's happening in commerce, with the rise of C2C as a category enabled by mobile, C2C is emerging as an important communication channel. As with anything, its emergence means that the implications are still being understood and the potential is still being harnessed. (See here for an overview on the evolution of media types and what they mean.)
Let's focus in on some of the areas impacted for businesses:
Public relations: As companies are able to understand how they are viewed in real-time, they will be able to target their responses (or better, be ahead of the incident). Even though BP at the time got high marks from PR experts for its use of social media, you can imagine that they could have avoided a lot of their public missteps in other media had they been listening.
Advertising: Brand advertising still has eye of newt as its standard metric. Understanding audience and how they perceive your brand, and then understanding sales per segment, means that tying Brand advertising directly to revenue is possible in the not too distant future. (Note: this has been done in a lot of controlled experiments, but it hasn't yet been operationalized to be a standard metric such that pricing can be based on result.) Effectively, this changes the conversion funnel into a conversion cycle.
Product development: The world becomes your focus group. You can follow tastes and trends real-time and ensure that your product sticks its landing. Of course this is easier when you have a product that is similar already in the market, so that you can keep track of how messages about missing and existing features are resonating with customers.
Hiring: The perception of your company in the marketplace has a strong impact on the kind of talent you are able to attract and retain - and how much you need to pay them (either in salary or benefits.) For companies that have a geographically dominant workforce (company town), it may also be able to (legally) monitor employee sentiment real-time. But, as I say, the legality of some of these things are still to be understood as the technology advances.
Stocks: The SEC ruling that social media is an allowable form of public disclosure means that aggregating not only the initial statements, but the way the public is reacting to them will start to have a one/two punch on stock prices. Even without the "official" disclosures, there is a ton of signal on whether a company/product is trending up or down that can be used to inform buy decisions. Even though Warren Buffet had issue with it, it fundamentally follows his formula of watching what his wife was doing to spot trends.
So, we get to an interesting question: if all of this data is going to generate so much value - why are people giving it away? Or, more precisely, are people able to evaluate the value of their data before deciding to trade it for a service (such as Instagram's new features?)
Now, there's an interesting thought: people start to understand their own influencer score and charge for access to their broadcast channel according to how valuable they are to the advertiser. (Then again, that breaks the trust model.)
*It's been a long time since I read the book, so that passage may be from a different Jim Munroe story. If you've read the book, let me know if I'm wrong. If you haven't, you should.