I spent a lot of time in the 1990's working on CRM istrategies and deployment with Peppers & Rogers, Siebel, Pivotal, Onyx etc. One of the biggest issues was transactional information versus real engagement. In many cases the CRM was not really a 'relationship' at all but data warehousing and analysis. Very useful for sales and marketing targeting, deduplicating data collection procedures and great to have details of customer interactions when dealing with a support query. How does Web 2.0 and the concept of social media tools take CRM forward? This is a question I asked Paul Gillin (author of the best selling book ‘The New Influencers’) in my interview with him. 

This topic of Web 2.0 and CRM was covered at the recent Gartner conference.

• Traditional media using blogosphere to create a buzz on future stories

An interesting use of blogging to pre-sell a story. Shows how old media, in this case The Economist, is actively using new media to help them.