Over at Business 2 Community, Felicia Savage wrote a compelling piece about Indiana University Health’s decision to live tweet a kidney transplant and what it taught her about marketing. Why would anyone do that? According the people at IU, it was fairly simple—they wanted to educate people about the process, thereby dispelling their fears, and get people to visit their kidney donation page and contribute money to research. It worked in a big way.

In B2B marketing, the free ride is over. That’s the unnerving upshot of a report issued earlier this year by Unica. Metrics demonstrating a connection between social network advertising and sales are the rule of the day. And hence, the need to align social network metrics against sales data means that free tools tied to particular programs are falling out of favor. Pressure to measure up internally isn’t the only thing driving B2B marketers. Consumers increasingly have the upper hand, and are making contact, with sellers. Capitalizing on in-bound marketing has become critical.

In the past year, protecting copyrighted material has inspired heated debate. In fact, since the inception of sites like Facebook, StumbleUpon, and Pinterest, website owners have begun to question the wisdom of leaving their content open to sharing.

Today's enterprise employees use, hopefully at home, Flickr, Yahoo!, Facebook, and other online tools with rich user experiences. Increasingly, they are demanding that at work.

At first, this seems an absurd question. Of course, the individual owns it. But, is this accurate? And what do we mean by "own"? What what is owned? What if you work at a company? What if that company supports your LinkedIn activity? What if that company pays you to make contacts? To be sure, there are many questions of ownership. In this discussion, I'd like to focus on one, specific question: who owns the expressions about your current employer?

OK, it seems that about once a year the 'next great social media tool' emerges. This year, it seems to be Twitter. Last year, it was Facebook. A couple of years ago, LinkedIn was all the rage. That leads me to a couple of burning questions:

1. At what point is it acceptable to abandon or ignore a social media tool?
2. When does it make sense to include a new social media tool as part of your social marketing strategy?

Synchronous communication requires an equal time and attention commitment from each party. In contrast, social media typically relies on the convenience and flexibility of asynchronous communication. That is, it allows parties to communicate even when they are not online at the same time.