“… CMO responsibilities should include:

– Ensuring the company’s products and services are in tune with consumer demand. … a CMO should be the representative of the customer within the C-suite.

– Directing new product development and ensuring the continuing appeal of existing offerings. …This means no more resources wasted on products that customers don’t have a reason to choose over the competition.

– Marketing communications. To those who equate marketing with advertising, this is often seen as the primary CMO function. Marketing communications certainly are part of the CMO agenda, but they shouldn’t define it. This is due to the simple reason that a great product will trump a bad ad, but a great ad won’t save a bad product.

– Hold CMOs accountable for achieving top-line growth objectives. Revenue and share offer the best measurement of how well a company fulfills the needs of its customers.

– Hold CMOs accountable for meeting corporate margin goals. This will ensure that product formulation, pricing, trade and consumer promotion are balanced business decisions. ”

In short, marketing is about the alignment of needs and solutions to everyone’s mutual benefit. Social media can/is/should be used in all of the ways listed above to achieve that.

I do agree that there are plenty of effective one-to-many approaches (and Dell’s blogs are an example) but I think to write-off the more personalized applications is a mistake.

Social media is (mostly) the constraint-free link between one (individual, enterprise) and thousands (or millions) of recipients.

How you measure their response is a different matter altogether.