Last year Douglas Rushkoff took on the conventional wisdom of brand marketers at the Pivot conference. Earlier this year we posted his talk and it caused a good bit of debate about the nature of so-called "brand conversations" in social media, and the future of branding itself. This is an important topic as social CRM solutions begin to proliferate. According to Gartner, 4/10 of the businesses it polled are planning to roll-out social CRM initiatives within the next five years.

A presentation by branding agency Face takes a different view and advocates a synthesis of data-driven social media analytics and qualitative methods such as ethnography to make branding relevant in the social media age. The presentation quotes Mark Earls saying "Consumers' most valuable relationships are not with brands but with other consumers."

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