With Social Web taking shape over the last couple of years( over 500 million customers are socially networked) and showing signs of aggressive growth, customer profiles are increasingly getting accessible and I see more and more misuse of the same.

The recent one that I have experienced is in Linked-in where I get almost one request a day to join one forum or the other. The forum effectively is a method to network and conduct business without my permission. This is the starting instance of professional misuse of the network. I see this as an evolved spam in the garb networking with your peers in the industry. Similarly in the B2C arena, with google, facebook and  soon to announce google's groupon like services, our data - both demographic and behavioral, is  increasingly getting threatened to be misused. Take another services company Spokeo, they claim to be #1 reverse email company to find email addresses of customers and they are even the first ones to link your physical address with your email address! Days are not far-off when all your information will be out on the web!

In the traditional offline world, there were regulations that were brought-in like DNC lists for telecalling, Unsubscribe for email marketing etc. but these are archiac in the online social world. How do we ensure that content providers and service providers - who trade our data for advertising revenue be controlled? This are exactly the questions customers are being besieged with as there is a huge information overload which can lead to blindspots for marketing programs. 

This is where new service providers seem to be mushrooming. For example - Personal.com is an interesting model where their proposition is:

1. Where customers set the rules to share their data, not companies!
2. It helps customers manage their identify across various services that they access to.
3. Instant personalization of content, offers etc. basis their profiles and information
4. Advertisers compensate customers for having a dialog with them!

I believe the day is not far-off when customers will clamour for control of their data and seek not just commercial returns as it is widely touted but even advice, mentoring, support, customer care/service that they can get for the information they share will evolve. 

We all know the mobile will become the centre of what consumers do. In the recently concluded Mobile Future Summit, the impact of this device has been summarized quite well. There were several good speakers and here is the essence of what some of them had to say:

Steve David, was a keynote speaker. Steve spent over 30 years at P&G , the final assignment as P&G’s CIO responsible for their Internet Strategy.

Steve laid out the case for Advocacy being the new measure of marketing. It has a lasting impact on the brand, the sales, and the relationship with the consumer. Companies who have a better understanding of the customer via sophisticated analytics and can quickly take the solutions and products that consumer want and need gain long-term competitive advantage. Insights from the market must be processed in real-time that can empower decision making at every level of the company. And mobile is central to this strategic shift. Mobile is being used to attack the counterfeit problem worldwide, in formulating personal recommendations as trust in brands erodes, in collecting analytics, and engaging interactions with products and services using NFC, etc. 

In the session of The Balance of Privacy and Monetization from Consumer Data,  advertisers like adidas want to move from 1-2-many to 1-2-1 relationship with the consumer that increases the volume and quality of the transactions. The valuable variables to track are location, propensity to buy, past actions, traffic inputs, etc. Discovery and recommendations also become important part of the whole process.

I do believe the next phase of customer engagement is on the mobile. The ability to build relationships using content, engagement & micro-transactional engagement using analytics & interaction studies are going to determine the success of brands.

NY Times carried an article last week about the new kinds of banking services that are emerging in the post recession era! Some of the new names that they mention are SmartyPig, Kasasa, PerkStreet etc.

The concept is pretty simple these are simple online checking or savings accounts with an objective to save you from the grips of mega banks. They give you higher interest rates, help you achieve your goals with some smart savings plans, no surchage fee ATMs access etc.

I am not really sure how these new concepts work as we have seen online only banks, peer-to-peer banking come and go. But, surely what I seem to take out is that :

1. Customer are increasingly thinking more about savings today than spending
2. They don't want to pay for services that are hidden or having surprises. The need for transparency is becoming more and more important.
3. There is a need for these banking institutions to align their products to a customer's investment goals. Save-to-spend later is an interesting twist am seeing in these services or products.
4. There is a need to simplify banking and some of the services to make it more accessible to many.
5. It is also interesting to see community banks coming together to offer these services. The smaller banks looks like were far more closer to their customers than the bigger ones. But, clearly just transactional relationships will not be order of the day for the banking instituions.

Trendwatching has come out with interesting consumer trends for 2010. One thing that caught my attention was - Tracking & Alerting as an important trend for 2010.

I think this trend provides a huge opportunity for companies wanting to take advantage of data-led marketing for their products or services.  

"Tracking and Alerting is something that consumers actually need and want, that delights them, that they crave. They are quite literally asking for relevant information, even giving you permission to provide them with more," Trendwatching.com said.

In the era of privacy and DNC, Tracking and Alerting provides huge advantage for marketers to take advantage of permission marketing. If you were a travel company, imagine a service that let's you alert about long weekends coming well-in-advance ( say 2 months in advance). This will help consumers plan their holidays. It's a huge engagement tool.Hence, planning their travel bookings with them.

Or if I were an insurance company, imagine a service that alerts me to taking an yearly medical check-up or an application that alerts me to my fitness regimen! It's a service that I will really appreciate from my insurance company rather than quarterly renewal notices!!

In my opinion, herein lies a huge opporutnity for companies to take advantage of this trend. The ones who do it, will win the war of customer engagement for 2010.