Well the balls now in some one else’s court, I’ve submitted my proposal to help revive Tux magazine, so we’ll see what happens. However this turns out, I’m now convinced that there’s a market for social media management. Most company’s don’t have the skill set to properly engage in authentic conversations across the web on behalf of their brands.

The question is how to turn this into a product or a service? Company’s like USocial are successful in delivering numbers to brands. You want 10,000 likes, no problem, it’ll cost you $1,167. But what do you do with those followers once you’ve got them?

That’s usually the extent of most marketer’s understanding of social media. More followers or likers is good, it’s also something tangible they can point to when their bosses ask them how they’re doing on social media. The problem, is that they don’t get the fundamentals of permission-based marketing. That’s where the real magic happens. Once you’ve gotten permission to talk with your customers, what do you say? How do you turn those followers into customers? Ahh, there’s the real crux of the biscuit.

Photograph courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons: Avoir Chaud