Social Contacts: A Hairy Open Problem

Our audience of readers is full of entrepreneurs. And what do entrepreneurs do? They market and they sell. Well, at the very heart of the marketing and selling problem is the concept of lead generation. Once upon a time, it was a rather straightforward exercise of collecting names and mailing addresses, and then running direct mail campaigns. As the Internet became mainstream, this was largely replaced (at least in the universe we live in) by email marketing campaigns, so the key information was the email address of a lead.

Today, the problem has once again changed definition. Suspects and prospects are everywhere in the vast realm of social media, watching, reading, commenting, engaging. And to engage effectively with them, we need to reach them through all those various channels.

So, the definition of a lead database has expanded from being Name, Address, Email ID, Phone No, etc. to include Twitter handle, LinkedIn profile, Facebook profile, Blog URL, and more.

Yet, the process of generating such lists with all the Social Contact data remains cumbersome, time-consuming, and necessarily manual. Very little by way of technology has been applied to the problem thus far.

It needs to be.