Ignorance is not bliss - Social networking and the power of masses

CRM - gone are the days when companies managed customers through call center operators intelligence and digging customer buying data from stacks of hard disks storage areas.
With half a billion plus global citizens using Facebook and research showing Americans spend 23% plus of their time online on blogs and social networking tools, I also humbly think it is imperative that businesses latch on to this bandwagon of online....
Having said above, I realize customers are not sure what to do and how to enable social networking and end up benefitting from this.
What does Social networking mean to businesses?
Some companies are claiming to have social enabled themselves by having a presence in Facebook and twitter. Is this enough? Does this benefit? I think to start with this is good but this alone is surely not sufficient.
· What would the end customers benefit by joining the Facebook site of the company? -- News?? Information??
· What would companies gain by just having a Facebook site? --- Additional branding??
Do the above really claim the benefit and power of social networking?? - Absolutely no...
Few examples:
http://www.facebook.com/jetairways
Jetairways - seem to have realized that social networking adoption is a key and a must and has gone to the extent of including their "social networking" line item as part of "about us" section. Well that is really nice. However, what you see when you click that link is a further two links to Facebook and twitter.
Now I go to their Facebook site and realize that their "photos" section is updated 6 months ago. However, I see user feedback comments as recently as 25th July 2010.
The "wall" is nothing but promotional news items, key initiatives included. However, I realize every item has close to 100 comments and equal numbers of "like" acceptance. This is the key message here. 100 plus user feedback on every initiative. WOW!!!Now the key for Jetairways as a company is what and how these feedbacks are consumed and actions taken against them.

Against this initiative, Jetlite new uniform, 102 users voted saying they liked it. And 95 users have provided their comments as well. few example comments below
Anoop Kerala pls avoid this type of uniforms,should prefer full sleeve shirt & tie 4 both male & females.pls add airhostess uniform
Sofiane Boutalbi Nice uniform!Altough I love the yellow ones!
Nikhilesh Jariwala ya,i want to b like dat.."
Esther Bhandare not so gud... earlier was better.....
Nirmalya Ganguly ‎@ all - there's no point screaming like this - once done, this dress is not going to change for years, for sure! Personally I feel the Saree for the Female Crew was better & elegant, the previous shirts of male crew shabby through; probably Jet wanted to get out of the Air Sahara hangover including the Saree, thats why the new dress, seems so ;-)
Deciphering the above samples, the key decision is should Jet continue with this uniform or drop it or change it. Also, should jet treat the above samples as an important representation of their consumer community or avoid them conveniently.
Solution to follow in the next part….