Filters Between Customers

Very nice piece over at Emergence Marketing on one of the challenges facing companies that might be thinking of using social networks as a form of enabling communications between customers and the company. How do you find, rank and rate the relationships among customers so that you can isolate the "popular" people, from the "influential" people, in relation to your product or service? For instance, I am sure Dell have many people that blog and email about their service or products. But can they pick out the ones that matter and influence them? As usual all of this, or most of it, will be influenced by the state of your data, and how well you are able to mine it. And to turn that on its web-head, could you make that data available back to your customers so it would help them find out who was most "influential" or "informed" in relation to that subject matter? I can think of instances where if people could find of ask the opinion of such a person, it might help companies better manage rumor mills that get out of control.

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