• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, August 30, 2010

The Social Media Insider Summit started off the way these summits usually begin: With a sponsored breakfast workshop. But you're definitely going to want to follow the thread on this one, literally. That's because it was being presented by Ryan Deutsch, the vice president of emerging media at ThreadMarketing.

Deutsch more or less challenged the roomful of marketers and social media gurus to help him understand how they're utilizing social media in the customer retention, acquisition and overall relationship marketing.

Deutsch divided the process into four pillars – listen, learn, engage and influence – and suggested that influence may ultimately be the most important element for a brand.

That's not to say that marketers haven't been learning some powerful things about their customers simply by listening, learning and engaging. And Deutsch managed to get a few highlights that I'm going to share with you now.

Tom Panchak, group marketing director at Johnson & Johnson, gave a powerful example of a program he oversaw for the Accuvue contact lenses brand a couple of years ago.

"We noticed a difference between teen participation and young adult or parent participation," Panchak shared, explaining that the teens, "thought that parents would not allow them to have contact lenses because of their irresponsibility."

On the other hand, Panchak said parents simply did not want their teenage children to "grow up too fast."

What did J&J do with this insight? Panchak said the marketer created something it called a "teen/parent negotiator" – a social media tool that enabled teens to talk to their parents – "in a funny way" – that would enable them to understand why they wanted contact lenses. In other words, listening to social media gave J&J a real sense of vision for the disconnect between two important customer segments.

A social media expert from Palm gave another example, explaining how an elite group of its 50-100 "most knowledgeable, passionate advocates online" revealed a huge disconnect over a seemingly common

"We found that 50% of them do the absolute wrong thing, and 50% do the exact right thing," he said.

ThreadMarketing's Deutsch concluded the session by challenging the audience to define "social CRM for me?"

No one could. Or at least they didn't offer to try. So Deutsch gave ThreadMarekting's own definition:

"Thread sees social CRM as combining traditional CRM data with conversation data and relationship data. Things you don't have today."

"Is anybody tracking that data at a customer level in their business today," he asked?

Only one attendee – a woman from Famous Footwear – said "we're starting to do that."

ThreadMarketing's Deutsch