With the arrival of the new year - and new marketing budgets - companies are exploring how to develop and implement new customer segmentation. Here's how marketers can plan for a segmentation that is more useful and profitable.

Authenticity is a key part of social media marketing. Social media strips away a lot of the barriers that companies face due to the nature of media. The people are the new mass media; the gatekeepers are gone. If you are going to participate in conversations online, they are not going to happen on your own ground.

We look at social media as a system. From the business perspective, it is really the relationship between customers, and you can always get smarter about customer relationships. Social media creates a massive disruption in the world of customer relationships, and marketers need to pay heed.

Two years ago, social media was all about "Wow, Facebook and Twitter - get on those!" Last year, what you would hear was, "Wow, I need to look at all this stuff, and there are tools I can use to analyze all of that material out there." A ton of vendors popped up and provided services in that space.

People in general are going to talk about your brand, and how they experience your products and services. Those conversations will be both positive and negative. If it's a good discussion, some tips that I would suggest are to be thankful and engage and recognize the consumers, and reach out and say what you think as well. It is someone giving you a high five, in a way, by using social media.

Successful companies combine PR and advertising, using PR to build their credibility, increase consumers' awareness and drive sales. A company can advertise throughout the whole spectrum of the media and not see results, while one quality media placement can lead to results no one would have dreamed.

The typical underlying objective of CRM practices, whether they be programs, creative, systems or processes, is to improve marketing performance and strengthen customer relationships, making them more profitable. It follows, then, that senior executives do not look kindly on marketing when CRM programs fail. The calamity and opportunity here is that 90% of CRM failures are completely avoidable with effective management and ongoing oversight.

The days of static messages being mass mailed to untested lists are gone. The mass communications theories of the 60s have been replaced with the personalization technology of the 21st Century. Savvy marketers are enjoying the benefits of parsing data to version messages and illustrative materials for these segmented prospects. This clever tactic insures that the right person now gets the best pitch with the right offers, in a specific time period, whether in print or online. It requires that data is collected, cleaned, massaged and deployed.

The relevance of your marketing message is the most powerful driver of marketing success. You can have a great offer, but if the product does not interest the consumer, your message will be ignored. The main thing is to understand needs and preferences at the customer level.

We have been looking forward to the advent of addressable television for many years. In 2010, after all of the hypothesizing and all of the prognosticating, targeted ads on television based on data will finally become part of advertisers' core marketing strategy. The breakthroughs in addressability that were achieved in 2009 provide ample scale and proof of concept to drive significant adoption and continued innovation in the upcoming year.