<p>The purpose of business is to generate revenues or increase profitability. The purpose of social business is the same, converting benefits of a social enterprise such as collaboration, influence, loyalty, engagement, likes, followers, and rich data that allows for better targeting and customer understanding into concrete returns for the corporation.</p><p>Gartner predicts that by 2017 the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO. Marketing is increasingly becoming technology-enabled and this means marketing is transforming into a significant technology-enabled buying center. The marketing organization is learning how to use social networks of all types to buy and use data and make sense of big data coming from customer interaction to enhance the customer experience and develop new products.</p><p>We are seeing in the social business market the launch and discussion of a plethora of platforms, tools, apps, and tactics that will enable the use of listening tools to help understand, engage, target, motivate, and ultimately convert to customer sales.</p><p>Included in the plethora of product announcements last week at the Dreamforce conference was a Data.com tool called Social Key, set to launch in the second half of 2013. Data.com Social Key will harness real-time public social data including social networking sites like Facebook, Klout, Twitter, and YouTube for the most recent and relevant social information and connect it with business context of traditional data (like employer information or a phone number), giving companies the data insights necessary to develop deeper connections with customers.</p><p><a href="http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2207724/social-business-roi-the-emerging-opportunity-for-the-cmo">Keep reading...</a></p>