A Look at MIT Media Lab’s Fascinating Project, Comm.unity And Its Potential for CRM

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Being able to consolidate the many contacts, friends and associates from all the social networks you participate in to single contextual space that allows for them to be grouped by geographic proximity, trust, and shared interest is the ambitious goal of the MIT Media Labs Comm.unity platform.

The platform treats mobile devices as social sensors, the data from which can be used for creating socially- and locally-aware applications.  This platform can also be configured to automatically make connections when people meet – think of a real-time LinkedIn or Facebook platform with location and social intelligence.

The following video is an excellent use case and provides insights into how this new platform could be used for CRM and e-commerce applications.  Imagine if your sales force had this and was able to gain insights into which existing customers had a common need for a new product, or were interested in hearing about a new service being rolled out.  This would instantly map prospects by group, graphically showing their associations and then give the sales force the flexibility of responding to each prospect individually, in real time.  There are many more potential CRM applications for this platform, which makes tracking its progress at the MIT Media Lab worth signing up for their RSS feed.

It’s fascinating to consider the implications of this platform at the intersection of social networks and CRM.