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Noted VC Fred Wilson had a good post this morning, urging the Twitter community to get the creative juices flowing. He outlined five areas where additional growth would most likely occur.

Perhaps the most intriguing are the Enterprise and Vertical segments. Wilson references CoTweet, who merged with ExactTarget recently, and alludes to Chatter from Salesforce as the standouts thus far.That’s a strikingly bare bin considering Twitter launched almost five years ago.

If that activity points to anything, I think it’s that cumbersome CRM applications are quickly becoming a thing of the past. In some ways, the activity stream has replaced the CRM-based message.

Furthermore, if you look at the newer breed of social software entrants, much of their approach is rooted in lighter-weight tools and plug-ins – perfectly suited for Twitter’s API and evolving framework. Gone are the days of big back-ends and custom connector architectures. The mantra is loud and clear now — coexist and ease in to my enterprise accordingly.

Also, one enterprise company I thought was conspicuously absent in Wilson’s enterprise group was Yammer. It’s hard to point to another company that’s had as much influence inside corporations as Yammer. I think its recent push into customized communities (think external extranets) paints at least a partial picture of where things may be headed – a blurring of the lines between internal and external communities. That’s a huge opportunity that no one’s cracked that I’m aware of.

And I doubt anyone you know could name one vertical player in the Twitter ecosystem a la Stocktwits. It’s safe to assume one will likely emerge from advertising or marketing as social commerce continues to grow.

The real opportunities in that space will be helping brands harvest intelligence from the flurry of online engagement that will happen in distributed networks.

Below are Wilson’s five areas.

* Social Gaming – There have been a number of attempts to build social game experiences on Twitter. But I’m not aware of any successes of scale like we’ve had on the Facebook platform. I think we will see it emerge soon.

* Verticals – We have some successes to point to here like Stocktwits for finance and Flixup for movies but this is a wide open opportunity in most verticals and we haven’t seen as much effort here as I’d have expected.

* Enterprise – CoTweet comes to mind as well as the efforts that Salesforce has made to integrate Twitter. This is a huge opportunity.

* Discovery – This is one area where there is a significant amount of effort.Hunch, Listorious, TweetMeme, Cadmus, WeFollow, and MrTweet all come to mind.

* Analytics – While Twitter will obviously be delivering better analytics to its users, particularly its marketing and business users

The thing I like about SocialCast’s approach is their lightweight strategy, dropping in around existing apps and platforms as needed.

Eric Schonfeld described their approached recently around the company’s  funding announcement

The startup’s service combines a corporate activity stream that ties into CRM and ERP systems with social bookmarking, Outlook and SharePoint integrations, mobile (iPhone and Blackberry) and desktop (Air) apps, and analytics.

The bigger software vendors will own the foundation for collaborative technologies — it’s smarter to coexist and deliver information in a platform-agnostic way.

I also noticed mention of an AIR and mobile app, which is equally smart. There’s a contingency of users that will drive adoption outside of the internal portal with mobile and desktop apps alone.

 For starters, I liked the description of publishing. How’d I miss that one?

Publishing means connecting a community through the art and science of communication.

But the the passage that sparked the digital thought was the one that reinforced the economics of digital publishing and newer models of reaching and serving customers online.

In the digital medium, Brands can embrace the core tenets of publishing without the operating costs of traditional publishing approaches. In fact, by rethinking the approach to traditional marketing and customer service spending (including CRM and direct marketing budgets), Brands that become Publishers can finally integrate  large portions of their business that were once in disparate silos. And that is a very big deal, indeed.

Refreshingly, most of the companies I speak with are retooling various customer touch points to not only be more adaptive to the social web, but integrate better with existing processes. It’s that integration that can reduce some of the silos mentioned in the Battelle piece.

Tom Davenport raised a good point recently. He cited @comcastcares and Starbucks as examples of brands using Twitter and crowdsourcing for service and feedback but falling short on consistent communications. Davenport’s scenario reflects why some many companies are retooling systems and processes to capture more of the digital conversations happening in real-time.

But capturing those conversations is only part of the battle. You need a process for how customer information is passed through the organization.

You’re seeing the “left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing syndrome” magnified so much more these days. Marketing or corporate communications might be excited about making a connection to an influencer, but it’s wasted if the details of that relationship can’t be communicated accurately and efficiently.

And even when the flow is there, there’s still business processes that need to kick in for event-driven stuff. See Davenport’s example of walking into Comcast’s store — one line of business had no idea what the other had promised. Lastly, before you deem socialCRM as the savior, like other tools, it has more to do with how your business is structured.

Brands have to make sure they have the human infrastructure to transform the way a line of business operates..only then will the supporting tools serve their real purpose – enablement.

blogs.hbr.org

I concluded that I’d rather not be reminded through social media that Starbucks doesn’t really care much about me and my preferences as a customer. What social media sometimes do is make us aware that we can communicate with just about anyone — but it doesn’t mean that the other party will actually listen or respond. I, for one, would rather work with a company that truly cares through a single communications channel — even snail mail — than one that shows its lack of caring through all the latest Web 2.0 tools.

I configured Gist to scrape my LinkedIn, Outlook and GMail accounts and must say I’m pretty pleased with the early results. I’ll be using Gist over the next few weeks to compile some industry analysis for use at Telligent, so stay tuned for additional thoughts.