Online Business has developed tremendously in recent years. To promote business online, there are many important marketing strategies adopted by companies to generate revenue for their business. Closed loop marketing is one efficient marketing strategy that is key point in generating quality business leads and revenue for organizations.

About Closed Loop marketing

A successful company online is the one which manages its Closed Loop Marketing effectively and strategically. For large companies, inbound marketing experts help to maintain stability over their Closed Loop Marketing strategies and thereby generating Quality Leads for business. But what is this Closed Loop Marketing which helps businesses to develop faster and securely? This article gives a glimpse of Closed Loop Marketing and advantages of using it with the help of marketing experts.

[This is the fourth in a series on 6 Factors that are transforming B2B Sales in 2012. This factor deals with Social - and I have broken that down into four separate posts. This is the second of the posts on Social.]

Social Trust

We are seeing a fundamental shift in the interactions between buyers and sellers, and indeed between all commercial entities and their customers. Attitude and preference, as they relate to how a customer thinks about a business, are more likely to be informed by peer groups than by expensive commercials or company statements.

For any network to work effectively, it has to be built on trust.  Social networks in their current manifestation deliver benefit to the participant that is directly related to the associated trust currency, a wallet that is filled by value delivered in line with a promise made, where time is donated by the recipient in exchange for value received from the donor. Trust is earned in those micro-transactions and is fundamentally based on the transparency – perceived or real – of the social network engagement.  In the Social Universe, you can develop a personality where people learn who you are, what you stand for, and whether you are, in fact, as good as your word.

On the eve of the Facebook IPO, it's interesting how much negative publicity has been surfacing. Users don't trust Facebook to respect privacy. Investors don't trust Facebook to make money for the long-term.

Of course, privacy has not exactly been Facebook's strong point over the past couple of years. Two steps forward, one step back as the FB geniuses maneuver its products (us) towards making what we post as public as possible.

I get it. Facebook is a business. It has products also known as users. And customers also known as advertisers. And companies exist to sell products to customers.

But as one of those products er users, I just don't trust Zuckerberg to look after my interests in a responsible way. While it may be true that the world is moving towards a "share everything" model, that's not my personal choice and I don't want some 20-something dictating his world view to me.

I'm not alone. In today's San Francisco Chronicle, Lack of trust in Facebook may hold back ad sales discusses results of a recent poll which found only 13% of US adults trust Facebook "completely" or "a lot" with regards to protecting privacy.

And for more bad news...

Facebook is going public this week with an initial valuation approaching $100 Billion.  That’s a lot of money - is it a fair valuation?  I’m not an IPO expert so I will not debate the valuation but I do know that a site approaching a billion users per month, where the users are very engaged and interconnected with others on the site, is valuable.   Furthermore, the data generated by the users is a goldmine if ‘data mined’ correctly in order to increase user relevance and continue to bring communities together.   And web sites such as Facebook & LinkedIn are doing a very good job tapping into their user data through techniques such as social network analysis. 

Traditional customer analytic environments can benefit from those Social Network Analysis (SNA) techniques as well but what is SNA and how can it be used within traditional customer analytic environments?  SNA, specifically SNA applied to people networks, is a type of analysis which determines interrelations between individuals and groups.  These analyses may be used to: