There is increasing pressure on marketers to deliver increased marketing ROI through improvements in marketing performance metrics and resultant reductions in acquisition costs. Too often, marketers take the easy path towards attaining that objective by increasing direct mail circulation to former customers and non-converters without making the effort to customize targeting, refine offers/incentives, or tailor messaging to them.

As many have said, people were social long before there was social media. So when it comes to using social media for lead generation, let's not reinvent the wheel. Successful strategies remain effective. But, even the most successful strategies suffer from the inherent problem that lead generation is impersonal -- we just don't know who our prospective customers are, since we haven't met them yet. What's new is that social media platforms now allow us to become far more personal, sooner, in our customer recruitment efforts.