Listening: More and more companies are adopting the “@ComcastCares” approach to using social technologies as a means of listening to customers and resolving complaints.  The problem is that these interactions  don’t translate to actionable information and “valuable Social Sigma data ends up on the cutting room floor before it ever reaches product managers or R&D staff that could use it.”

Soliciting feedback: This is taking the concept one step further and actually explicitly asking for input through social channels.

Marketing:  Closing the loop and making sure everyone knows the company is listening to feedback and adapting accordingly.

Colony  goes on to say that since you’re initiating a continuous, real-time, rapid exchange with hundreds or perhaps thousands of customers, CEOs need to have the guts guts to pursue this social strategy and stick to it.

George’s Social Sigma concept aligns nicely with Sucharita Mulpuru’s recent report on Social Commerce where she calls out social recommendations as one of the top social marketing strategies being pursued.  Why?  Because it is easy to draw a straight line to the bottom line.

Back to SocialSigma and some of the underlying drivers.  We’ve heard from several analysts, customers and prospects that “going social” is largely driven by expectations created by their personal interactions with social media, even for B2B.  Scary!  Without adding teams of communicators, there have to be other ways that companies can innovate and become more adaptive.  We think that Baynote’s technology is one of those ways.  It turns your website into a real-time “listening” device.  And because it adapts the search, navigation and recommendation experience in real time, it also accomplishes some degrees of feedback solicitation.  It can create the specific website or email experience that people want to experience.

Why do you care?  Because this social technology makes you money by selling more. It makes you money instead of your competitors because they find good stuff on your site or save you money because they find answers on your site and don’t tie up your call center.

The excitement reached a fever pitch on Dec. 7 when Google announced it would begin displaying real-time results in its searches.

It’s an electrifying time to be a part of the Web to say the least, and it’s nice to see real-time at the forefront of conversation in the media and at industry events I’m attending.

Given that Baynote is focused on mining real-time implicit behavior on the Web, I’ve been asked lately on numerous occasions what my perspective on the real-time Web is.  Rob Hof, previously of BusinessWeek, also recognized our leadership in real-time back in August, when he featured Baynote as fifth on the list of real-time Web start-ups, behind the likes of Twitter, Facebook and Aardvark.

My take? I believe we are on the cusp of a brand new Web, one that will be driven by the power to tap into both real-time explicit and implicit intelligence, as well as the Collective Intelligence of all Internet users. Although much of the recent excitement about the real-time Web has been focused on gathering and making sense of explicit feedback captured in published sources, such as Twitter, you cannot possibly observe the Web merely by looking at it or reading it. Further, ninety-nine percent of what happens on the Web is never written, never rated, never reviewed. It’s told through implicit behaviors in the form of mouse patterns, clicks and hovers to name a few. It’s told through intent.

In the real-time Web, you can’t just watch what people say, you have to watch what they do.

At Baynote, we are focused on the business use cases of real-time, providing companies with the tools to tap into the implicit behaviors of customers on their sites, and learn, adapt and take action automatically. This Collective Intelligence is reflective of the silent majority, not the loud minority. It is free of bias, and requires no manual processing or analysis.

As the fever pitch for real-time continues to grow, we look forward to helping companies become smarter, more personalized, real-time businesses on the much longer road to actualizing a truly real-time Web. We will continue to watch this trend carefully and plan to write more about the real-time Web for business here in 2010.

Stay tuned for more insight.

The Era of Experts, Influencers, and Mavens
Guy noted that the old way to put a product in front of the masses was a trickle down approach. The goal was to suck up to the influencers, experts, and mavens that had an abundance of social capital and a platform to distribute your message to the masses. To make his point, he mentioned about a dozen of these “mavens,” including tech bloggers, popular media personalities and himself.
Bottom Line: Suck up to the important people, and that will effectively trickle down to the masses.

The New Age of the Masses and Crowds
Because of the advent of new technologies like Twitter, Guy argues that the most effective way to connect to users is from the ground up. Connect with users that are relevant within the context you are trying to reach. Influencers and experts will never be as valuable as the users themselves if you can reach them.
Bottom Line: Don’t ignore the experts, but make your audience and your users a source of collective intelligence that drives your business decisions.

Technologies like Twitter and Baynote’s Affinity Engine allows marketers to leverage their users in ways previously impossible. While Twitter allows marketers to speak to and gather feedback directly from their audiences, Baynote allows marketers to poll users through implicit observation. Ultimately, its all about making sure that your audience finds your products in a timely manner. Your audience may be on Twitter, but its definitely on your website and that is where Baynote comes in.