In a blog last month entitled “Social Networking : For the Doubting Thomas,” the Marketing Consigliere advised readers to heed the ubiquity of consumer-focused social networking sites like Facebook.  An excellent addition to the discussion is seen in the slides called “Portable Social Graphs – Imagining their Potential” put together recently by Jesse Pickard, May Shi, and Malcolm Ong of Avenue A | Razorfish, and Jesse Stay and Daniel Stern.  Take the time to read each of these slides… they really spell out the promise of social networks for marketers.

Obviously the B2C implications of this are staggering.  But what about B2B?  Can the data mining and predictive analysis  advantages of social networking be extrapolated into the B2B space?  While certain procurement, partnering and acquistion activities of organizations should correctly remain confidential, can’t B2B professionals use social networking tools to make better decisions, relying on their peers for information?  Perhaps professional membership associations could help foster these platforms and provide more value to their constituency.

The Marketing Consigliere would like to to thank Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research for making him aware of these great slides through his blog Web Strategy.  He is also also grateful to Jeremiah for inspring him to blog on his own when he mentioned the Marketing Consigliere in his blog in 2007.